Wed. December 29, 2010
WASHINGTON, DC – The Downtown DC Business Improvement District’s (BID) funding of a Downtown Homeless Outreach Team continued to improve the lives of homeless persons, moving 36 off the streets and into housing in fiscal year 2010, according to a recent report.
“Downtown property owners spent more than half a million dollars through the Downtown BID this past year to assist Downtown’s homeless population,” said Richard H. Bradley, executive director. “It was remarkably effective. Our partnership with Pathways to Housing DC is designed not to enable homelessness, but to help Downtown’s homeless get back on their feet.”
The Downtown Homeless Outreach Team program, acclaimed by national homeless organizations, is particularly important during Washington’s harsh winters, when cold weather can endanger the lives of homeless persons, Bradley noted.
The report highlights the accomplishments of the Downtown Homeless Outreach Team, a multi-disciplinary team of outreach workers that interacts with homeless individuals in the one-square-mile Downtown BID area. The program is fully funded through a 15-cent-per-square-foot BID tax, levied upon Downtown property owners.
“It makes me proud to work in a community where downtown business owners recognize the value of helping people who are homeless find housing, receive treatment and become integrated into community life,” says Linda Kaufman, Pathways to Housing DC’s chief operating officer.
Among the outreach team’s achievements:
- Placed 36 homeless persons into housing through the DC Department of Human Services’ “Housing First” program. Pathways DC estimates housing costs of approximately $25,000 per client annually, as compared to $225,000 for a bed at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, an estimated savings of $7 million per year.
- Engaged 320 individual homeless persons with meaningful assistance; they were engaged, on average, up to 10 times.
- Provided 276 instances of medical or mental health services to Downtown homeless persons.
“We partner with the DC government and nonprofit homeless service providers to bring outreach, services, housing and dignity to homeless people while improving comfort and security for workers, residents and visitors,” said Bradley. “Our philosophy is that homeless individuals are part of the city’s fabric, too, and we need to serve them. And we do, by finding solutions to their homelessness.”
The Downtown BID provides homeless services under six broad categories:
- Engagements – Encounters conducted on the streets and in Downtown buildings by outreach team members
- Basic services – Usually the first services, such as showers and meals, offered by the outreach team to homeless persons
- Medical and mental health services—Delivered in partnership with health care and mental health providers and includes detoxification and other services
- Benefit services – Provide the next step toward stability, namely regular income, by linking homeless persons to the benefits to which they are entitled
- Housing services – Find housing for homeless individuals and provide formerly homeless persons with services to ensure they remain housed
- Administrative functions – Entail interacting with the business community, property managers, and the safety community—including consultations with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and training MPD and others in strategies for working with the homeless.
Each service is designed to move the most hard-to-serve homeless population from the streets into stable housing. The Downtown Homeless Outreach Team engages with homeless people every day where they are in the community, taking the time to establish relationships and assist them with everything from obtaining documentation such as birth certificates and social security cards to providing emergency services.
The team is led by Jonathan Ward, the clinical director, and consists of two social workers, a certified addiction counselor, a licensed psychologist, and a community support worker. “The intervention process can be both long and challenging, but through relationship building, the team can assess homeless persons’ needs, then connect them to support services and housing, which can lead to a life of independence on the streets,” according to Chet Grey, the Downtown BID’s homeless services director.
“The Downtown BID has been at the frontline of the homeless crisis for more than a decade, providing leadership and partnering with agencies, businesses, and organizations to make a difference because it’s the right thing to do,” said Bradley. “We look forward to making continued progress in fiscal year 2011 and beyond.”
Pathways to Housing DC is a nonprofit housing and services organization for chronically homeless single adults. The fiscal year 2010 contact report that it submitted to the Downtown BID is available at www.downtowndc.org/homelessreport.