Creating
safer communities,
one training
at a time.
We can all be part of the solution to emotional and mental health crisis in our communities.
eLearning modules will be available in Fall 2023.
Have you encountered crisis in your family, at your workplace, or in your neighborhood? Do you want to help, but worry you might make things worse?
This training was designed with you in mind.
You don’t have to be a mental health professional to make a difference in someone’s life.
Facilitators Jules Plumadore and Kenneth Kozi Arrington look at the problem of community crisis through the lens of social justice and provide person-centered solutions grounded in empathy, personal agency, and mutual support.
Frequently asked questions
Our communities are experiencing an unprecedented rise in emotional and mental health crisis. Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention educates participants on how they can personally take compassionate, supportive action to respond effectively to it, regardless of their level of experience, minimizing risk and improving outcomes for everyone involved.
Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention focuses on individual, person-to-person responses to broad-spectrum emotional and mental health crisis. It covers topics such as understanding crisis and our responses to it; barriers to crisis response like fear, stigma, and discomfort; responsibilities of a crisis responder; assessing the difference between fear and danger; goals and principles of successful crisis response; de-escalation and crisis response techniques; and post-crisis support.
While the training does address advocacy and coalition-building around the need for community mental health resources, they are not the primary focus of the training. Similarly, while some of the training’s subject matter overlaps with responding compassionately to suicidal thoughts and feelings, Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention is not a suicide intervention training.
Absolutely. Goldfeather Consulting takes the position that community crisis response and social justice are inseparably interwoven.
Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention is a Black and trans-led training. As advocates, activists, and people with lived experience, we support the reallocation of funding away from weaponized police intervention and towards community-building resources, including accessible mental health care.
Participants of all backgrounds and life experiences are welcome and encouraged to attend and participate, and the ideas and principles discussed are broadly applicable to all. Because the lives of Black, indigenous, and trans/gender-nonconforming people of color are at greatest risk of violence during police intervention, the voices and experiences of those most directly affected are highlighted in the training itself.
Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention was developed with a broad range of participants in mind. It is appropriate both for Peer Specialists who have crisis response experience and for community members who have never responded to crisis before; for people with their own lived experience of emotional and mental health challenges and for people supporting someone close to them; for employees in community-based work and for their employers.
We hope that anyone who recognizes the need for community-based response to crisis that honors the unique lived experience of each person will join us. We believe that everyone who takes the training will learn something new or think about something differently as a result of their participation.
Yes it can; in fact, this training was designed to support people who have positive intentions and want to put them into action but don’t know how.
There are a lot of other crisis response/crisis intervention trainings out there, and some the material in them may overlap in part with this one. However, this training is different in a couple of important respects:
We focus on social justice, advocacy, and building coalition. We acknowledge that while some of the ways we express ideas may be unique to our training, many of the ideas themselves have been practiced successfully by global indigenous cultures throughout history. And while we focus on the individual’s role in crisis response, we cannot separate it from the need to work together to build consensus, capacity, and coalition to create communities that decrease the likelihood of crisis, rather than increase it.
We emphasize building confidence and community. Many other crisis response trainings focus primarily on skills and techniques, with the result that participants may come away with an intellectual understanding of them while still lacking the confidence to put them into action. We believe the skills themselves are fairly intuitive once participants have developed a deeper understanding of crisis and their own responses to it, so we place a greater emphasis on building confidence and community with other crisis responders to ensure that everyone involved feels supported before, during, and after responding to crisis.
This training was inspired by Senior Consultant Jules Plumadore‘s work both as a member of the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) faculty for the San Francisco Police Department and as a presenter at community crisis response events sponsored by Justice 4 Kayla Moore and Berkeley Copwatch. Jules recognized that police should never be first responders to mental health crisis and that training community members on supportive crisis response skills could help create more sustainable solutions to emotional and mental health crisis.
Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention draws on a variety of sources, including the practices of global indigenous cultures throughout history and the successful crisis response practic of thousands of people with lived experience and workers in community-based organizations across the US and around the world. The training also references the research and work of Dr. Carl Rogers, pioneer of person-centered mental health; the thought leadership of Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University; the stigma-elimination research of Dr. Patrick Corrigan; and many more.
We offer a limited number of scholarships each month to participants who would otherwise not be able to attend. Please contact us for more details at admin@gowithgoldfeather.com.
We think so! And our participants do too. Here’s what some of them have to say about the training:
• This training helped me realize and tap into my own humanity and move away from fear and into compassion when seeing someone in distress.
• Take this training if you want to be helpful but feel unable to or like you get in your own way.
• It has totally changed my perspective and eliminated my fear of crisis response.
• It will inspire you.
• This training can save lives.
Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention is both a standalone training and the foundation for a system of ongoing education, community building, and support, including a seminar series on breakout topics from the main training and a free monthly support session open to all training participants.
At this time, Goldfeather Consulting is not able to certify participants as crisis responders. We are currently looking into how we may be able to offer certification in 2022. We do provide Certificates of Completion to all participants who complete the full day of training.
We may be able to provide you with CEUs, depending on your requirements. Please contact us at admin@gowithgoldfeather.com for more information on whether Community Crisis Response Without Police Intervention meets your CEU needs.
We love to work directly with teams and organizations! To discuss how we can make that work for you, please contact Senior Consultant Jules Plumadore at jplumadore@gowithgoldfeather.com.
Please contact us at admin@gowithgoldfeather.com with any additional questions. We look forward to talking with you!
Online registration is currently open through April 2021 on the last Saturday of each month. You can register here, or by clicking the button below. Please check back later for May – December 2021 registration information.