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Child & Family Services is unveiling two new mobile crisis vans to help South Coast residents struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues.
The mobile vans will help area residents overcome stigmas and barriers to accessing behavioral health care, including high cost, lack of access to transportation, and a lack of knowledge about available resources.
“Right now, 70% of people still go to the emergency room for behavioral health,” said Pam Bolarinho, vice president of Child & Family Services’ Acute Care Services. “We’re trying to flip that, so that 70% go to our offices and only 30% go to the emergency room.”
Child & Family Services has always provided individuals with care at the facility or through home visits by a clinician on the mobile crisis intervention team. Now, the vans will provide additional support – especially for people who have been unaware of the services or who don’t have access to transportation.
“There’s still such a huge unmet need for mental health and substance abuse,” said Phil Gomez, Child & Family Services’ mobile crisis director for New Bedford and Fall River. “We know there’s people out there who don’t know about our services, and we really want to reach those people.”
One of the two vans will primarily serve the New Bedford area, while the other will respond to emergencies from Fall River to Plymouth.
The vans will be stationed in high-need places such as schools, bus terminals, and densely populated areas, to create a consistent presence. The same clinicians and support staff will operate each van, enabling them to build relationships and become familiar, trusted faces in the community.
The mobile crisis team hopes those who need help will be motivated to knock on the van door and ask for it.
“We’re not soliciting anybody,” said Bolarinho. “When patients don’t feel like they’re being pressured, or that their voice is taken away from them and that they’re being forced to do something, it makes a huge difference.”
Matt Oliver, a licensed mental health counselor, will be the clinician inside New Bedford’s van. As a van clinician, Oliver hopes to further the organization’s work and reach in the city.
“I see the van as a space where the community, both clients and providers, can build trust and help foster relationships with Child & Family,” he said. “The van will be seen as an extension of the great work that our team already does in the community by being more visible. We will absolutely go out to where the community needs us to be.”
Gomez, the mobile crisis team director, said the inside of the vans are designed to be “patient-friendly and very welcoming.” There’s a desk, a couch, and benches. To create a comfortable environment, the vans are climate controlled and have dimmable lights. Monitors allow patients to participate in telehealth appointments. Homeless kits are at the ready.
The staff on board the vans can also assess patients. During an assessment, the clinician and the support staff will decide what the best course of action will be “to reduce the risk of future episodes.” These could include allowing a patient to stay overnight at the organization’s offices, admitting a patient to a psychiatric hospital, or providing them with outpatient treatment.
“We didn’t just want to build something functional,” Bolarinho said at the vans’ ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday. “We wanted to build something that’s patient-centered, community-focused, and, yes, aesthetically pleasing. Every detail was intentional.”
Bolarinho said she thinks the vans will reduce common obstacles to care for New Bedford residents. For example, none of the vans or Child & Family services require insurance.
Bolarinho said that she believes the vans’ model of service is the first of its kind in Massachusetts. In designing the program, services in San Francisco and Chicago served as models.
As of May 2025, San Francisco’s Street Crisis Response Team has received 59,761 calls for dispatch, and 47% of crises were “resolved on the scene,” with the client “remaining safely in the community.”
“Within a year, San Francisco noticed a significant difference in people actually going for treatment,” Bolarinho said. “They went to a lot of those areas where there were a lot of unhoused individuals, and frequently had the van visible around those areas. I think that’s how people bought into it.”
Bolarinho also took inspiration from Child & Family’s co-response program with the New Bedford Police Department, established in 2019. Clinicians ride along with officers to cases involving a behavioral health crisis.
The van model is not a co-response model, as the Police Department will not be involved unless Child & Family deems it absolutely necessary for a given situation.
“Let’s face it: cops can’t be out there solving everything,” said Assistant Deputy Chief Derek Belong at Wednesday’s ribbon-cutting for the vans. “[Child & Family] had this bright idea to have clinicians out doing the work that maybe the police officers weren’t necessarily educated to do. We started off with the [co-response] pilot program, and here we are, six years later, with these beautiful vans.”
In addition, individuals grappling with behavioral health often seek help in the emergency room. New Bedford’s 2022-23 Community Health Assessment noted a shortage of beds in emergency departments often prevents patients from being seen, assessed, and placed. Child & Family has the capacity to treat these patients faster.
The mobile crisis team talked about getting a van in the past, but wrote it off as fantasy. That changed in 2023, when the state awarded Child & Family Services a contract to become a Community Behavioral Health Center. Bolarinho thought a van program would be a creative way to expand their mobile crisis care.
With funding from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and a Justice Department grant awarded in 2024, Child & Family Services bought two vehicles from Vandoit, a Missouri-based custom van company. Each van cost $160,000.
Child & Family Services plans to have the New Bedford van on the road by mid-August. If the model proves successful, Bolarinho sees the organization acquiring additional vans.
“We do believe that this will be the first of many to come, that other teams will be inspired to get a van,” she said. “We want to see this extend statewide.”
At the ribbon-cutting, Bolarinho said, “Today is not just a celebration of what we built, but of where we’re going. This is about creating a future where care is accessible, mobile, and built around the needs of people. The work [that the mobile crisis team] is about to do inside this van will truly change lives.”
Annica Dupre is a summer intern with The New Bedford Light, as part of the South Coast Internship program, designed for local students.
This is such a practical and compassionate service that is very much needed to help individuals with mental health issues get the treatment they need, when they need it most.
Thank you much needed
This is what real systems change can look like. A big move toward trauma-informed, community-rooted responses. I hope it’s backed with strong clinical support, peer involvement, and sustainable funding. The New Bedford area deserves that.
Very well written article covering multiple aspects of this new important initiative to serve the community.
The Child & Family Services name doesn’t fit the goal of the van. They should call it the Community Behavioral Health Van. Child and Family conjures something not associated with mental health issues.
The organization Child and Family services Inc. is who has the contract for the New Bedford regional community health center. Different organizations are awarded the contracts for different regions throughout the state.