Wren Farrell is the emergency and disaster preparedness reporter for KALW. In 2023, he joined UC Berkeley's inaugural class of the California Local News Fellowship. For the California Health Equity Fellowship, Farrell will explore Sonoma County’s new mobile crisis units, from their call system to their service providers to the long-term effects their interventions have on clients.
I thought a story about Sonoma County’s alternative crisis response program would be straightforward. Instead, I ran into obstacle after obstacle.
Sonoma County’s Mobile Support Team aids crisis cases, but systemic gaps leave issues unresolved. Without stronger social services, crisis teams provide only temporary relief.
Last year, Sonoma County got state funding to expand one of their existing mobile support teams so that their crisis responders could operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But such crisis intervention isn’t always what you’d expect.
As the program tries to address some of Sonoma’s biggest challenges, how well will it work, and what can other cities learn from the results?
