Adam Negley, standing, addresses visitors at the Mental Health and Recovery Board of Union County Thursday afternoon. The board held the meet and greet for local members, officials and Negley, who was named executive director of the board in December.
(Journal-Tribune photo by Michael Williamson)
—
The Mental Health and Recovery Board of Union County has a new executive director.
Board members and other community leaders welcomed Adam Negley at an open house Thursday afternoon. Negley was named executive director on Dec. 19.
He said Union County has appealed to him as a place to work for some time.
“Union County has always been the county that I’m excited to come to and hear what’s new and what’s different and what’s innovative with what’s going on here,” he said. “I’m also grateful, really for the first time in my career, I feel like I’m serving the community that I live in and I’m a part of.”
Negley said he lives 15 minutes from Marysville, just over the county line in Champaign County, and said being able to serve the community he calls home is a big driver to the job.
Prior to coming to Union County, Negley served as health commissioner in Pickaway County for just over two years, beginning the job in the middle of the pandemic.
He said his career has always centered around the public sector and health and human services, finding that behavioral health was something he wanted to focus on.
“Prior to working in Pickaway County I had worked for about eight years for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services,” he said. “Behavioral health kind of became my home.”
Negley has spent over 20 years as an administrator in numerous public-sector health and human services settings. He’s led a variety of projects at The Ohio State University College of Public Health and the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
He said his time there was informative but ultimately wanted to get away from academia and back working with the public.
He also had roles at Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare and the state psychiatric hospital located in Columbus.
Negley said his goal in Union County is to continue the work of the board in being able to provide youth and family services to residents.
“We just received, at the beginning of January, another federal SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) grant that is going to enable us to greatly expand services that are placed in schools for kids and families,” he said. That will allow the board to expand the school navigation program and bring family peer support into the school setting.
“Those individuals are right there with the teams working with the students who are having issues,” Negley said. “Then they can work directly with the parents and the caregivers to help them navigate the system and be a peer as they go through that system.”
He said starting that work earlier will have a greater likelihood of making an impact in those kids’ lives.
He said the continuing growth in the county will be a challenge to the board going forward.
“The growth angle that we experience is certainly about more people coming in and being able to continuously have both the level of services and the array of services that people need,” Negley said. “Obviously we’re going to lag behind growth to some extent but we want to try to minimize that lag as much as possible.”
He said the other challenge is to recognize the diversity of the county and account for the different needs of all the residents.
“There is a northern part of the county that looks very much like it did 50 or 100 years ago and then there’s a southern part of the county that’s changing by the year,” he said. “So how do we balance our services and understand the needs of the varying populations of the county.”
He said he’s looking forward to tackling those challenges and getting to know the community.