Barbara Schneider Foundation

Your donation will be used to train more police, nurses, teachers, families and communities how to prevent, manage and de-escalate mental health crises.

The Barbara Schneider Foundation works with community members as well as with its partners in law enforcement, courts, corrections, mental health, social service, health care and education to prevent mental health crises and improve the response to people in a mental health crisis. 

The Foundation was formed in response to the death of Barbara Schneider on June 12, 2000, when she was shot during a confrontation with police in a 911 crisis call. Since then, the Barbara Schneider Foundation has been involved in working to improve the response to mental health crisis  by working with its partners in all these systems to grow the CIT (Crisis Intervention Team) movement in Minnesota.  

Every person with a mental health disorder who is responded to in a crisis has a unique story to tell and is on their own particular journey of recovery.  Along the way, many experience job loss, alienation from family, homelessness, poverty and criminal justice contact. If a person in crisis has a positive experience with a responder and does not experience any trauma or injury because of the crisis, they are able to move forward with their recovery and live in wellness.  The responders are also safer and less traumatized when they use the skills and techniques taught in the CIT training's. 

But CIT is not just about training. The result of doing this training has been: 

• more appropriate and effective mental health crisis response,
• improved safety for the person in crisis, the responder, and the community,
• and growing criminal justice/ health care/ community partnerships.

Communities both large and small are seeking solutions to crisis issues and situations. Community collaborations and partnerships are essential to this effort. Additionally, it is important to establish community ownership, which may be described as a dedicated investment that individuals within the community have in the CIT program. Individuals and organizations within the community must have a stake in the initial planning stages; the implementation of the CIT program and its training curriculum; and ongoing feedback in order to maintain, improve, and ensure the success of CIT.

In addition to our training's and our community conversations, we also have programming for students that uses an integrative approach of theatre to explore and learn about crisis and de-escalation. 

The Barbara Schneider Foundation works hard to promote and support our criminal justice, health care, education and community partnerships as they develop so we can work together to build strong, safe, healthy communities where everyone can recover and live in wellness.

 Below is a video from our 2018 CIT Conference on Trauma. One of our attendee's wrote this song is a refection on the day, what was learned, conversations, and the community we want to see.