Recognize
Practical signals that a person may need additional support.
Innovation LabsStart a conversation
Selected work · Community mental health
Agora
A
A supervised, faith-sensitive mental-health referral-extension model for settings where trusted community actors are often approached before formal care.
Question being tested
Can trusted community actors extend the referral frontline without exposing people to unsafe or unsupported intervention?
The operating problem
Trust is already present. The care boundary often is not.
People in distress may first approach faith leaders or other trusted community figures, especially where formal mental-health access is limited, delayed, unfamiliar, or stigmatized.
That contact can create a pathway toward care—or an unsupported substitute for it. Agora specifies what safe extension requires without asking community actors to become clinicians.
The first operating form
Bounded support. Clear escalation. Supervised continuity.
Respond
A bounded, humane first response that protects dignity and does not imitate clinical care.
Escalate
Explicit thresholds for urgent risk and clinical involvement.
Refer
A usable handoff into appropriate formal or community-based services.
Supervise
Support, review, and accountability for participating community actors.
Continue
A defined role in follow-through without crossing clinical boundaries.
What must be validated
Safety depends on the whole pathway.
- Whether distress and escalation signals can be recognized reliably.
- Whether the referral destination can actually receive the handoff.
- Whether supervision is available, useful, and sustainable.
- Whether consent, confidentiality, and role boundaries remain intact.
- Whether people experience the pathway as trusted and useful.
Begin a conversation
Testing a community mental-health pathway?
Share the health idea, who it must help first, the decision ahead, and why it matters now.
victorladele@fhilabs.comExternal perspective
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