This report describes the results of a regional needs assessment of workforce issues related to the delivery of community-based services for children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance or mental illness and their families in a region comprising 12 southern states. The assessment involved a survey of key stakeholders, principally parents, State mental health agency officials, local service providers, and advocates. The survey sought to identify the priorities of State child mental health systems over the next 5 years and the implications of these future directions for the workforce. The survey addressed issues related to recruitment and retention, staff distribution and utilization, staffing requirements for community-based children's services, preservice and inservice training, State capacity to address workforce issues, State-university linkages related to workforce concerns, and change strategies. Study findings include, among others: (1) mental health systems are heading in the direction of more and new types of community-based services, joint initiatives between child mental health and other child-serving systems, and development of new financing mechanisms; (2) new types of community-based services being developed are therapeutic foster care or family treatment homes, in-home services, day treatment programs, therapeutic group homes, intensive case management services, crisis intervention services, respite services, and community-based residential treatment centers; (3) 69 percent of those surveyed considered workforce issues to be at least as important as securing adequate funding; and (4) 71 percent believed that the major reason staff were not adequately prepared was because university curricula are not relevant to State priority areas. The survey instrument is appended. (JDD)