A pair of Ford Transit high roof vans built for Carson Tahoe Health, the not for profit hospital system in Carson City, Nevada, to do youth mental health outreach and to record podcasts. Not food trucks, same build methods.
Nevada ranks last in the country for mental health access, and about 87 percent of Nevadans live in a federally designated shortage area. A building does not fix that, because the problem is distance. These vans take the service to the school, the park and the community centre instead.
The build: a high roof Transit you can stand up in, rooftop solar with a ladder at the back so somebody can actually reach the panels, a battery pack with a transfer box to switch over to generator power, an awning, a TV for playing video, a full sound system with a microphone, a rubber floor, an inch of insulation and plywood behind the walls, cargo space for event kit, all wiring in conduit and every outlet on its own breaker.
The insulation and the lining are not only about temperature. A bare metal van is a poor place to record, because hard parallel walls throw reflections back within milliseconds and smear speech. Lining the walls adds mass against road noise and gives a surface that absorbs rather than reflects.
Hospitals, county health departments, school districts, tribal health programmes and non profits all need vehicles like this, and most of them do not know anybody builds them.
Full build write up, the power system and what licensing a mobile outreach vehicle involves
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