Mary Parrish

Mary currently serves as the Behavioral Health Innovation Project Lead on the Missoula Police Department's Department of Justice Connect and Protect Grant. This grant enhances our community's capacity and ability to bridge the gap between emergency responders and behavioral health crisis receiving services and sites, ensuring that any neighbor in behavioral health crisis receives the right response, at the right time, every time it is needed. Relationships, communication, trust, and transparency are critical components of an effective, integrated, and coordinated crisis response system, including assessment and refinement of that system. These are also core values in and across Mary’s systems, operations, and community work efforts. She is a Community Health and Prevention Sciences professional with a background in research and evaluation broadly, and a commitment to community-based participatory strategies specifically. She has 10 years of experience in Missoula's public, community, and behavioral health systems through employment with the public health department, local federally qualified health center, the University of Montana Mountain Campus, and now with the City of Missoula's Crisis Intervention Team Program at the Missoula Police Department.