The Connecticut Women’s Consortium, Inc. (CWC), formerly known as The Consortium for Substance Abusing Women and Their Children, began as a workgroup of the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Fighting Back Initiative. Fighting Back was “designed to assist communities of 100,000 to 250,000 people to implement a variety of anti-drug strategies to address their communities’ substance abuse problems.”  In 1990, New Haven, Connecticut received a phase I planning grant and continued to receive funding through phase II (1992-1997) and phase III (1998-2002) of this initiative.

Also during the early to mid 1990s, the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) initiated the Integrated Services System (ISS) that was designed to establish a regionalized network of services of addictions care.  The Connecticut Legislature provided funding in 1995 to connect these two initiatives and The Connecticut Women’s Consortium was born.  When funding occurred to establish CWC, the Hospital of St. Raphael served as the fiduciary before CWC became established as a non-profit. 

Since 2006, CWC has delivered training to approximately 3,000 providers of behavioral health treatment services through-out Connecticut through a variety of venues that include conferences, workshops and behavioral health agency consultation.  Trainers include both well known national consultants as well as a wide variety of Connecticut’s own experts in the behavioral health field. Training participants include staff from both the non-profit sector as well as public sector staff from the Department of Correction, the Department of Child and Family, Court Support Services Division, and Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.  CWC has partnered with the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services on their Trauma and Women’s Services Practice Improvement Collaborative (WSPIC) initiatives to build Quality Improvement techniques and skill within its system of care.  In addition, CWC has developed policy briefing papers for legislators regarding women’s behavioral health and promoted legislation to identify the unique behavioral health needs across Connecticut’s system of care for women and women with children.

At CWC’s inception, its goal was to make sure that women’s unique behavioral health needs were met throughout the DMHAS system of care through (1) the development of objectives related to policy, advocacy and training needs for those providing addictions care, and (2) the advocacy of policies that identified, promoted, established and implemented activities that enhanced opportunities for women’s recovery from addiction.The goal of CWC today remains to provide training, policy and advocacy activities related to women’s unique behavioral health needs.