At SOUND Behavioral Health, we are inspired when young people step up to make a difference in our community. A group of students from Mercer Island High School —Levi Jones, Ronan Buckley, and Connor Flume — have done just that with their initiative, 988 Find Your Peace.Through T-shirts and sweatshirts featuring the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 988, these students are helping normalize conversations about mental health and letting their peers know that support is always available. All profits from their apparel go directly to SOUND, helping us provide critical counseling, crisis intervention, housing support, and recovery services throughout King County.
As we embark on a new year, now is the time to reflect on the journey behind us and our aspirations for the year ahead. In 2023, our organization navigated change, met new challenges, and strengthened our operational efficiency and care delivery.
Words like “lockdown,” “social distancing,” “mask mandates,” and “herd immunity” became our common language in the aftermath of the pandemic. While these words carried significance to us all, another word emerged as Sound’s truth this past year: “resilience.” Our clients, our team members, and our leadership team were faced with ongoing obstacles and hard realities that truly tested us. And revealed a lot about us, too.
Organizationally, Sound prevailed, thrived even, over the past year. The pandemic thrust us into “triage mode,” where we quickly responded to the challenges it presented. We did not hesitate to take care of our team members, by extending paid sick leave and administrative pay for team members who had to stay at home to care for loved ones while working, and provided premium pay levels to team members who, due to client need, worked onsite at our locations. We rapidly outfitted each team member, more than 500 professionals with laptops so that team members could work from home when we all went into lockdown.
This past year, Sound acquired Community Psychiatric Clinic, a well-regarded behavioral healthcare provider in King County. With the acquisition of CPC, Sound increased the number of people served annually to approximately 26,000. We added four additional outpatient locations and dozens of properties. Though we are now generating $85 million of revenue on an annual basis, with 17 locations, the acquisition reflects a first step in an intentional growth strategy for the organization that will ultimately expand our reach beyond King County.
King County has launched 10 new mobile crisis teams, expanding immediate mental health care access and reducing the burden on other agencies. Operated by DESC and SOUND Behavioral Health, these two-person teams serve adults in crisis across the county.
King County continues to ramp up its behavioral health services following the approval of a $1.25 billion by voters. With the latest development being the launch of an expanded and streamlined mobile crisis team-program last week.
DK created his #mycausemycleats alongside AWS using gen AI to support two organizations: Prison Fellowship & SOUND
