There won’t be a Project Homeless Connect event in Knoxville this December. That’s actually a good thing, and I’d like to explain why. Here in Knoxville, we have held three annual volunteer events known as Project Homeless Connect. Conducted on a single day at the beginning of December, Project Connect gathered our community’s resources, agencies, providers, and volunteers under one roof at the old Exhibition Center downtown and offered to the homeless an opportunity to come in and connect with those resources in a way that hopefully removes multiple barriers and speeds their ultimate access to permanent housing.
Project Homeless Connect is based on an event first conducted in San Francisco and replicated in cities across the country. In Knoxville, this event has not only provided an opportunity for our homeless neighbors to connect with help they need, but it has also provided an opportunity for agencies, ministries and individuals who work to help the homeless every day to connect with one another. Especially at the first two annual events in Knoxville, there were many “ah-ha” moments, where one provider or ministry learned about another and figured out how they could coordinate not only at Project Connect, but also when they returned to everyday work back out in the community.
The first Project Homeless Connect was held in Knoxville on December 8, 2005. At the time, the Knoxville-Knox County Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness had been written, but its implementation had not yet begun. Because of that, Project Connect was also seen as an opportunity to introduce the Ten Year Plan to the community and to demonstrate that the time was right for us to coordinate and cooperate around ending chronic homelessness. That first event brought together over 350 staff and volunteers, providing help to over 450 clients. Services provided at the event included behavioral health, employment services, housing information, Social Security and Medicaid assistance, food stamps information, rehab services, veterans assistance information, clothing, food, transportation, immigration services, senior services, ID assistance, and haircuts. The Attorney General and Public Defender’s offices worked with the local judiciary to hold court hearings at the event, and Remote Area Medical, with the support of the UT College of Nursing, provided medical, dental and vision services. Many individuals also consented to have their information included in the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a client database that allows service providers to share information and coordinate services for the homeless, and helps our community to gain a better understanding of just who and how many are homeless in Knoxville. The event was a success, connecting many homeless individuals and families with needed services, and even a few directly with housing opportunities. Perhaps even more importantly, the event proved that our community is willing and even eager to cooperate in unprecedented ways around this issue.
The second Project Homeless Connect was held exactly one year later, and gathered 460 professionals and volunteers together to help over 500 individuals who came through the doors. By this time, implementation of the Ten Year Plan had begun, and Project Connect served as another opportunity to reaffirm a commitment to greater coordination around the goal of ending chronic homelessness. Once again, Project Connect functioned as a focused model of all the services and ministries that work with the homeless, bringing together under one roof our continuum of homeless care that operates out in the community the other 364 days each year. The event showed us how we work together, how our homeless neighbors interact with us, and even where some of these systems needed to improve, raising questions like, “How do we better coordinate case management and provide follow-up after each interaction with a homeless neighbor?”
The third Project Homeless Connect was held in December 2007. This time, 419 professionals and volunteers came together and served almost 900 individuals who came through the doors seeking help. By many measures, the event was again successful, but it also seemed clear that ‘the word was out,’ and that many who came to the event were not homeless, but came nonetheless, seeking access to medical services from Remote Area Medical, or legal services that were being offered by the local courts.
We have learned a great deal from Project Homeless Connect. In this third year of implementing the Ten Year Plan in Knoxville and Knox County, we are seeing that the kind of coordination and cooperation that began as a one-day concerted effort at Project Connect is now happening every day out in the community. For instance, every other Tuesday, a group of individuals meets to coordinate efforts to identify, help and house the most vulnerable and challenging of the chronically homeless in our community. This group includes homeless service agencies, ministries, mental health providers, hospitals, the police department and others. Through their consistent efforts over the past year, more than a dozen people who were previously falling through the cracks - some for years - have now been housed.
Volunteer Ministry Center has shifted their entire focus to housing and providing case management for the chronically homeless. The Salvation Army has begun a program to provide employment counseling, training and placement for those same individuals, coordinating directly with VMC. Also coordinating with Volunteer Ministry Center is the Compassion Coalition, which has begun an initiative that will recruit and train volunteer mentors from the faith community who will help formerly homeless individuals who are now housed as they seek to reintegrate into our community. The Community Action Committee is now providing case management services for public housing residents who have been identified as high-risk for eviction. CAC’s services will help those people stay housed, preventing them from likely homelessness.
Through connections made at Project Connect, Remote Area Medical has been able to establish a greatly expanded weekend-long Knoxville ‘expedition’ in the Jacobs Building at Chilhowee Park. This annual RAM event is held in January and provides medical, dental and vision services for many hundreds of uninsured people, including the homeless and working poor. In addition, VMC is expanding their year-round volunteer medical and dental services in their new building this fall, and Cherokee Health is also about to expand medical and mental health services for the homeless.
Knox Area Rescue Ministries began on October 1 to provide a daytime “Welcome Center,” where the homeless can come in for shelter and immediately begin finding the right path off the streets and back into housing. This Welcome Center is conceived and designed to be a single place where a homeless person can come in and connect not only with KARM’s services but also those of many other agencies and ministries in our community. Those connections will be made not only by referral, but directly with people from those agencies and ministries who are located onsite at the Welcome Center. The local courts are developing plans to provide specialized services and hearings for homeless individuals who are working with a case manager and for whom appropriate relief from the courts will remove critical barriers to housing, employment and community reintegration.
As we look to December, 2008, it seems clear that as we continue to pursue the goals of the Ten Year Plan, we have learned a great deal about better coordination and more purposeful efforts to not just help the homeless but to help end homelessness. Many of the things that we learned at the one-day Project Homeless Connect event are now being done out in our community year-round.
Because so much of Project Homeless Connect is now being accomplished out in the community every day, there won’t be a one-day Project Connect event this December. There is still much more to be done to end chronic homelessness and decrease short-term homelessness in Knoxville and Knox County, and we have learned from Project Connect that by coming together around the commitment to do that work not just for one day, but every day, we will be able to achieve just what we have set out to do.
As always, I want to thank everyone who made each Project Homeless Connect event happen. I also want to thank everyone who works or volunteers year-round, making successes in ending chronic homelessness an every-day thing in Knoxville.
Mike Dunthorn