At last week’s Toledo City Council meeting, Toledo resident Mark Doland, a community advocate for the Marshalltown Police and Community Team, or MPACT, spoke about the possibility of such a program coming to Tama-Toledo.

Doland has over 25 years of experience in the mental health field, from being a corrections therapist to performing crisis outreach in Cedar Rapids. Although this was his first appearance before the Toledo city council, Doland has been campaigning for a co-responder program for some time, including having conversations with Mayor Sokol and previous Toledo Police Chief Nathan Shepard, all before he went to work for MPACT.

“I think the concept of co-responders is a concept that has taken off nationwide,” Doland said.

The job of a community advocate is wide ranging, as they deal with not one problem but many called upon them.

“When law enforcement responds to any kind of situation, sometimes it’s not necessarily law enforcement related,” Doland said. “There’s sometimes counseling sessions going on in police cars and in the police department that wouldn’t have ever happened if I wasn’t there.”

Whether it’s homelessness, substance abuse, domestic violence, elder assistance, family conflict or mental health, the list of situations that a community advocate deals with goes on and on.

Not only as a community advocate and mental health worker but as a resident of Toledo, Doland would like to see a program like MPACT come to Tama County.

“The public needs to have some trust built up and some confidence built up in the police department again, and so I think that moving forward with community relations, I think it’s a good thing to have somebody with a background in social services to be able to advocate for both sides,” he said.

When asked about the possibility of a co-responder program coming to the community, Toledo Police Chief Dan Quigley said, “We will be researching different resources and trainings to see what would be most suitable for our agency.”

“As with anything, we are always looking for ideas and areas of improvement. This is evident with the local discussion of possibly partnering with Tama and STC with an SRO (School Resource Officer) position,” Mayor Sokol said.