Azusa Pacific University

Azusa Pacific University serves just over 10,000 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students annually. This project will enhance our university crisis response system by creating a campus infrastructure for seamless integration of prevention, intervention, outreach and linkage to address student mental health and substance use. APU will implement the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services to ensure the needs of vulnerable student populations are included throughout project planning and implementation. Goal one is to develop infrastructure that would increase the knowledge and capacity of APU faculty, staff, and students to identify risk factors, response protocol, and resources for the prevention, treatment, and intervention of issues related to mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention. Objective 1: Project staff will train 75% of APU faculty, staff, and students by December 15, 2020, via a mental health symposium on protective and risk factors, response protocols, and linkage resources for student behavioral health and substance use needs. Objective 2: Staff will develop and distribute an updated directory of internal and external resources for mental health and substance use services to 100% of APU faculty, staff, and students by January 31, 2021. Goal two is to increase the skill set of campus behavioral health staff and students on conducting culturally sensitive assessment and outreach for mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention. Objective 1: Project staff will train 90% of therapists at the University Counseling and Community Counseling Centers by September 30, 2019, to conduct brief psychosocial, substance use, and suicide assessments. Objective 2: Project staff will train 50 faculty, staff and behavioral health graduate students as peer educators on conducting linguistically and culturally sensitive outreach and messaging strategies by June 30, 2020. Objective 3: Staff will distribute four strategically timed quarterly campus-wide risk reduction messages by June 1, 2021.