Mayor Parker's Administration Strips Funding From Key Mobile Crisis Provider

The city of Philadelphia has terminated its $3.8 million contract with The Consortium, one of the city’s oldest community mental health centers and the sole mobile crisis unit serving all of West and Southwest Philadelphia. In a petition urging the city to keep its contract, The Consortium says it will no longer have the funding to continue their mobile crisis operation. 

Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration abruptly moved to defund the longest running mobile crisis unit in Philadelphia without communicating a plan to replace them with another agency. This is a serious blow to the thousands of uninsured people who rely on The Consortium for care, and it is a tremendous setback for mobile crisis services at a time when we desperately need more teams operating across the city. 

This news also comes on the heels of the Parker administration defunding harm reduction efforts and revealing plans to construct a $100 million facility to involuntarily warehouse people who use drugs right next to the city jail complex. It appears to be part of the administration’s shift toward carceral responses to people who need improved social services. 

Right now, The Consortium is the only mobile crisis unit serving people in West Philadelphia. They will no longer have the funding to continue this operation in the new year. To ensure continuity in services for people in West Philadelphia, we demand: 

• A plan that outlines who the city will partner with to provide non-police mental health crisis response in West Philadelphia. 
• An expansion of mobile crisis teams to keep pace with the demonstrated need for this intervention, not a reduction of them. 
• A commitment to include community leaders at every point of this process—before decisions like this are made—to co-create this vital program that affects countless people in our communities. 

At least 21% of adults in Philadelphia live with a serious mental health diagnosis. That means at any point, 1 in 5 adults in Philly are at risk of a mental health crisis. We refuse to sit back and watch the city defund vital social services without a clear, community-led plan to ensure continuity of care for Philadelphians who rely on these life-saving services.