Greensboro behavioral health team wins elder justice award

Greensboro’s Behavioral Health Response Team won the 2026 Elder Justice Champion Award as Guilford County leaders push to measure whether crisis calls involving older adults are being handled faster, more safely, and with less trauma. The honor from the Guilford County Family Justice Center spotlights a model built to connect people to care first, not default to arrest.

The award comes from the Family Justice Center’s Elder Justice Committee, which recognizes an individual or organization that helps foster a safer community for aging adults. The committee says its monthly work centers on professional training, collaboration, community outreach, and case review, all aimed at improving the response to elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

That local network did not start from scratch. The elder-justice work grew out of the Guilford Adult Interdisciplinary Network, established in 2010 to bring together social services, law enforcement, mental health, emergency responders, long-term care ombudsmen, and aging-service providers. The Family Justice Center made elder abuse a formal focus in 2013, and the center says its multidisciplinary team has since earned state and national recognition for reducing risks for older and vulnerable adults.

Greensboro’s BHRT became part of that ecosystem after beginning in December 2020 and officially launching in January 2021. The team, housed in the city’s Community Safety Department, pairs specially trained Greensboro Police Department officers with behavioral health professionals and can respond through 911 as a police-clinician co-response or, in some situations, as a clinician-only alternative response. By early 2024, the city said the team had answered about 4,000 calls for service.

Those numbers matter because BHRT is designed to interrupt a pattern familiar to many Guilford County families: repeated calls, untreated mental health or substance-use crises, and older adults caught in situations that can escalate quickly. The city says the team also handles follow-up and service coordination, with the goal of diverting people away from the criminal justice system and toward treatment when appropriate and available.

The broader safety infrastructure has also shifted around it. Greensboro’s Community Safety Department became a standalone city department in January 2025, with BHRT remaining one of its core service areas. The Family Justice Center, which describes itself as a one-stop shop for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, and elder abuse, says 45 professionals from 14 disciplines work together under one roof to provide coordinated safety, legal, social, and health services.

As World Elder Abuse Awareness Day was observed on June 15, the award put a familiar local test back in view: whether Greensboro’s behavioral health response model is not just innovative, but measurably better for aging adults in Guilford County when they need help most.