Common Ground was honored to participate in the community-wide interagency response to the November 30 Oxford High School shooting.
Hours after the shooting, Common Ground had two advocates in Oxford High School, supporting the front-line high school teachers and administrators late into the evening, who were required to stay and participate in the police investigation. For the next week, Common Ground advocates, therapists, crisis responders and nurses answered the call of Oakland Community Health Network (OCHN) organizers and spent a collective 144 hours supporting the Oxford community at planned events. Furthermore, Common Ground management worked countless hours behind the scenes to collaborate with community partners. Hotline workers on both the Resource and Crisis Helpline and MiCAL increased normal staffing patterns to ensure full hotline coverage in case of a surge in outreach. Additionally, internal supports were set up to provide daily support sessions to Common Ground workers to debrief on their difficult and emotional experience in Oxford.
After the first week, Common Ground workers filled in as asked by OCHN to go to Oxford schools to be on-hand to support families and staff in need as they returned to school. Common Ground staff across the agency who were not called to Oxford worked extra hours and put in extra effort to enable those who needed to step away from their regular duties to be covered with normal business operations. Finally, plans are underway to provide support groups as needed when the community is ready.
In all, a tremendous financial, physical and emotional effort was put forward by Common Ground, and we couldn’t have accomplished it without the generous support of our funders, who acted just as quickly to provide generous financial assistance.
For more information, read the December 20 Macomb Daily article, Recovery a long and winding road for Oxford and region.