Therefore, the Office of the Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness would like to invite each of you to a meeting on Monday evening, March 30, 2009, from 6:00-8:00pm at Cherokee Health Systems. We will not discuss siting considerations for permanent supportive housing.

Instead, we invite stakeholders to engage in a conversation that addresses two questions:

1. What does each permanent supportive housing development need to do in order to be a good neighbor in the specific community in which it is located?
2. What do permanent supportive housing developments need from the neighborhoods where they operate in order to best be incorporated into the neighborhood system?

This meeting is open to the public, and has been announced accordingly.

Meeting date and time: Monday evening, March 30, 2009, from 6:00-8:00pm  

Meeting location: Cherokee Health Systems, 2018 Western Avenue Knoxville, TN 37921

If you have any questions, please contact me.

Sincerely,
Robert Finley
215-3071

The Ten-Year Plan is beginning its third year in Knoxville and Knox County. Knoxville’s faith community has been serving people who are homeless for much longer than that. The Plan acknowledges their crucial role:

Faith-based agencies generate and utilize a wide range of volunteers who seek to help homeless persons find needed food, clothing, shelter, and hope for a better life. The ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness recognizes the importance of partnerships with faith-based organizations and the task force considers them to be one of the critical components in the plan to develop permanent solutions to homelessness.

Stabilization & Reintegration

The program that Mrs. Bocángel leads, Support Circles, is a key part of the Ten-Year Plan’s effort to help people get off the streets and reintegrated with healthy community.

A chronically homeless person’s first step out of a lifestyle of homelessness is stabilization in permanent supportive housing, the cornerstone of the Ten-Year Plan. But it’s not enough just to help people get off the streets and into a home.

Homeless people live in a separate culture that operates within and parallel to the one in which most of us live. That parallel culture is harmful in many ways. To help people who are leaving chronic homelessness avoid returning to the familiar culture of homelessness, we must help them achieve reintegration into our larger and healthier culture. That’s what Support Circles is all about.

“The idea is that before these folks got into housing their community was the streets,” said Mike Dunthorn, project manager for the Ten Year Plan, “and it’s important to connect them with the rest of us, so they aren’t tempted to go back to harmful influences when things get tough.”

Support Circles is a collaboration between the Ten-Year Plan and the Compassion Coalition. In her capacity as Faith-Based Mentoring Coordinator, Mrs. Bocángel will help develop a mentoring program for members of local faith communities to assist people who have been chronically homeless, to encourage them as they are placed into permanent housing, and to help achieve success in their new environments.

Her new job responsibilities will include recruiting teams from local faith communities, training those teams on the objectives and operations of the mentoring program, and coordinating with case managers to pair the mentor teams with people who are recently housed. Once mentoring teams are established, Mrs. Bocángel will follow up to assure that training and case coordination work as smoothly as possible, with the goals of maintaining residents in their new housing, and reintegrating them into the mainstream of the community to the greatest extent possible.

“I’m thrilled about this opportunity to be a part of something extraordinary,” she said. “It is by far the most challenging undertaking I’ve ever signed up for.”

Mrs. Bocángel has worked with the homeless here in Knoxville, as well as in an international context, since 2004. She is a trained Stephen’s Minister, and she operates with a personal philosophy of servant leadership. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to work in such a hands-on capacity to help meet the needs of the chronically homeless community here in Knoxville.

If you’d like more information about Support Circles, please contact Jessica Bocángel at the Compassion Coalition: (865) 251-1591 x8.

““Probably about $400,000 a year is what we spend just on psychotropic drugs to treat the mentally ill. I’ll tell you, we are the largest mental health facility in East Tennessee,” says Jones.”

That quotation comes from a story (Sheriff: 1 in 5 Knox Co. inmates is mentally ill) published at WATE yesterday.

Sheriff Jones advocates an overhaul of the present system, one that includes permanent supportive housing, which is the cornerstone of the Ten-Year Plan. Our plan commits us to permanently housing homeless people as rapidly as possible while providing those now-housed people with customized supportive social services to ensure that the greatest possible number of them stays successfully housed and moves towards independence. This model is humane, it is tested and proven, and it is cost-effective. You can learn much more about it here.

Permanent supportive housing reduces the amount of money a community spends to serve homeless people. People in permanent supportive housing dramatically reduce their need for, and consumption of, psychiatric inpatient services, and other emergency services, such as emergency rooms, jails, and emergency shelters.

In communities in which the model has been applied, the cost of Permanent Supportive Housing is offset by savings in emergency services, jails, and law enforcement.

Permanent supportive housing is the right thing to do. As Sheriff Jones points out, people who are mentally ill need treatment, not incarceration. Some of the Knox County jail’s most frequent repeat inmates are chronically homeless people who are mentally ill, and jail’s not the best place for them to be. We’re glad to have such a strong advocate in Sheriff Jones.