Mental Health Leader to support homelessness exits

Housing and Homelessness

Central LA

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

When allocating resources, city and county agencies focus on the most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, and many at-risk individuals do not qualify for the services needed to achieve and maintain housing. We estimate that 75% of the people attending our Sunday Servings suffer from behavioral health challenges resulting from enduring the trauma of living on the streets. The majority of individuals who receive mental health referrals to services through our community partners never make it to the desperately needed services. Our staff is also seeing the negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health continue to impact the housing status of our program members, affecting their ability to navigate the pressures of maintaining employment and housing without increasing amounts of support. During the pandemic, the unhoused were disproportionately affected by social isolation and the lack of access to services and medical care.

Food on Foot requests this pilot grant to fund a licensed mental health worker to support our Jobs & Housing members and provide outreach services to over 200 Sunday Serving attendees per week. We have built trust in our community by showing up to distribute food and goods to 350-400 individuals each week for more than 1,350 consecutive Sundays. Our provisions incentivize unhoused individuals without a means of transportation to receive care at our site. Every other week the UCLA Mobile Clinic Project provides healthcare appointments and the Department of Mental Health distributes referrals. The Mental Health Leader will: - Work with a team of trained volunteers who will help clients to attend meetings and access the services they need. - Work in a harm reduction model with clients who have multiple barriers. - Develop effective, trusting relationships, with a focus on facilitating independence and maintenance of improved physical and mental health. - Provide clinical supervision to Case Managers/ Resource Coaches. - Provide guidance and support to life-skills training program facilitated by volunteers. - Provide interventions including such activities as: individual therapy; crisis intervention; psychoeducation; motivational interviewing. - Assist clients with becoming involved in daily activities, socialization, health maintenance, and develop a sense of community. - Provide warm hand-off services to clients with agencies, support services, and psychiatry specialists.

Engaging a mental health clinician will immediately provide easily accessible and consistent services to our Jobs & Housing Program members and Sunday Serving attendees. Concentrating supplies and services in one site introduces ease to those for whom traveling and leaving their belongings to attend appointments requires resources and risk. Historically, 80% of our graduates retain their full-time employment and permanent housing for at least one year after graduation. Building counseling services into our program will stabilize the rate of housing and employment retention and increase these rates in the long term. The majority of responses to a 2019 Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority survey question asking what could have prevented an individual from becoming homeless included the sentiment, "someone who cared about me." This grant will support our efforts to provide the compassion and resources that aid hundreds of people to leave homelessness and achieve security.

Food on Foot keeps accurate records for each of the services provided and monitors trends to determine the additional services our participants and members need. Given our goal of serving as many individuals as possible during the limited time frame of our Sunday Serving, we do not gather information from each participant. However, we continually survey our Jobs & Housing program members, both formally and informally, to gather valuable assessments regarding the efficacy of the various components of our programming. Their feedback, along with the observations of our program staff, led us to identify the particular mental health needs of those in our program, as well as those individuals who attend our Sunday Servings. To evaluate the impact of adding a mental health worker to our programming, we will also create cross-sectional surveys in partnership with the UCLA Street Medicine team and developed through a collaborative and iterative process to measure impact and change over time.