In addition to ensuring children, youth, and young adults have access to supportive and nurturing relationships, social-emotional learning, and safe, stable, protective, and equitable environments for children to grow (Sege & Harper Brown, 2017), they also need access to quality mental health care providers citywide. In New Orleans, the city’s approach to mental health access for children and young adults has been characterized by haphazard, piecemeal initiatives that have lacked both widespread strategy and serious, longitudinal evaluation of outcomes.

According to Child Trends (2019), children in poverty are 4 times more likely to experience three or more adverse childhood experiences than children from households with incomes twice the poverty level. Orleans Parish School Board officials released a statement in 2019 that “60 percent of children suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder and are 4.5 times more likely than their peers nationwide to show signs of serious emotional disturbance” (Killion, 2019). The prevalence of PTSD and other related mental health disorders among children and young adults in New Orleans is nothing short of a crisis and should be treated as such.