What do case managers do? As discussed at length here, case managers often facilitate “…coordination of services at a community level. Case managers connect their clients with the resources they need to take control of their lives, and are focused on the goals of the individual client. Case management is about empowering them to meet their goals. Case management is a way for you to go from one place to another place that you could not have gone on your own.”

Mike Dunthorn recently spoke with four of Volunteer Ministry Center’s case managers who work with residents of supportive housing. They talk about what they do, the folks they work with, and what they see happening in the lives of people who are given the opportunity to get off the streets and into housing in our community. Listen to what they have to say.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Permanent supportive housing remains the most effective strategy in combating homelessness, and communities around the country have found ways to locate housing developments in scattered neighborhoods. These developments have a record of success for both the residents and the neighborhoods.

The TYP can point to success in our own community, and Lyons and Martin underscore some of it:

Jon and his team have done a very good job of working with agencies to align their services to avoid redundancy and more effectively move folks toward getting the help they need. They are working effectively with faith-based organizations to make sure that assistance for the homeless leads folks to a path toward personal responsibility rather than enabling a culture of dependency.

Stephanie Matheny, of Citizens for the Ten-Year Plan, adds in the comments below the op-ed, that

In addition to the successes mentioned in the editorial, there are approximately 300 people who were chronically homeless who now have an apartment and a case manager because of the TYP. There are an additional nearly 300 people who were at-risk of becoming homeless, but who were able to remain in housing through the TYP’s homelessness prevention efforts. These quiet successes are easy to overlook.

Credit for these “quiet successes” rightly belongs to the people who do the work on the ground. Partners like Volunteer Ministry Center, Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee, The Salvation Army, Knox Area Rescue Ministries, Catholic Charities, to name a few, provide the housing and case management support that helps people move off the streets and into housing, keep their housing, and begin to rebuild their lives in the community.

We’re grateful for the support, and and for the support given by so many of Knoxville’s people to the organizations that make it possible for people who’ve been trapped in homelessness to make such significant changes.

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.