Denver will spend nearly $2.8 million in federal funding on four community-health efforts, the city announced Tuesday evening, including a broad mental health assessment and the launch of a second mobile health services vehicle.

The projects will be launched throughout 2022 and will be funded out of Denver’s share of the federal American Rescue Plan Act, according to the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment. In addition to the needs-assessment and the vehicle, the city will also host a youth mental health summit and spend $1 million to help food organizations upgrade their operations and infrastructure.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused enormous strain on our health system and revealed deep inequities in the availability of services to address mental health concerns,” Bob McDonald, the health department’s executive director, said in a statement. “These projects aim to inform what we can do immediately to improve the lives of our neighbors, address these inequities, and plan for a future where everyone has access to needed resources.”

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The four projects were “developed using feedback from Denver residents,” the city wrote. 

Paid for through $1.25 million in federal dollars, the largest-ticket item of the four projects is the behavioral and mental health needs assessment. The city will “conduct a comprehensive needs assessment of people needing behavioral/mental health services across the service continuum: prevention, intervention, care and treatment, harm reduction, and recovery,” according to the health department. The city’s goal is to determine gaps, barriers and unmet needs. Some of the $1.25 million will support current efforts or go toward kickstarting programming based on what the assessment finds.

The initial findings from this assessment are expected this fall, according to the city. Denver, like the rest of Colorado and much of the nation, is in the midst of a worsening overdose crisis driven by fentanyl and accelerated by the effects of the pandemic. Fatal overdoses in Colorado have spiked significantly in the two years since the novel coronavirus arrived in Colorado, and experts warn that the situation will only worsen in the coming years.

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The Denver Food Resiliency Fund will also dole out $1 million to “qualifying organizations” to help them upgrade their infrastructure, food systems and operations “to address the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on the community’s food network,” the health department said. The goal of the grants is to make the city’s food system more resilient and better prepared to respond to any other emergencies in the future. Grants are expected to be available beginning this summer.

The city’s suicide prevention team will hold the We Got This Youth Mental Health Summit on May 2, funded in part by $75,000 from the feds. Four hundred youth will be given the opportunity to attend “to gain more knowledge about mental health topics and create a space for their voices to be heard.” Mental health providers across the state have repeatedly warned that Colorado’s youth are struggling, and Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a state of emergency last spring. 

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Finally, $470,000 has been pulled from the federal funding allocation to set up and launch a second “Wellness Winnie,” Denver’s mobile medical and behavioral health services van. The current Winnie reached 3,500 people in 2021, according to the city, and a second one “could double the program’s capacity, add medical services and substance use treatment, and safeguard private protected health information by having fully enclosed exam/interview rooms.”

The health department wrote that it anticipated the second vehicle hitting the streets by the end of the year.

The funds for the projects come as part of the city’s broader $308 million allocation from the American Rescue Plan Act. Of that, city leaders have doled out $154 million. The city will get the latter half later this year and must spend it by 2026.