Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies & Investments 5/26/21

Can I hear the recording?

We have a recording now.

Yes, you can start.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay.

Well, I'm going to call this meeting to order.

This is the May 26, 2020 meeting of the Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments.

It is 2 p.m.

I'm Andrew Lewis, chair of the committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Council President González.

Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Peterson.

Here.

Council Member Sawant.

Here.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair, there are five council members present.

I do want to note that Council President Gonzalez is excused from the meeting, and I expect other folks will come in as the meeting progresses.

So let's start out with approval of the agenda.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Chair's report.

So today we're going to do a deep dive into hearing about a program that a lot of us here on the council have talked about extensively, Just Care, which has been active in the Chinatown International District in Pioneer Square.

I'm looking forward to this discussion.

I frankly think a big part of Our looming response generally to the crisis that we're seeing around homelessness can be informed by the leadership, the diligence, and the way that Just Care has approached the work in a very challenging part of the city with a very high density of our neighbors experiencing homelessness with high chronic public health needs.

and really just shows that while our city is facing extreme problems, there are bold solutions that really can lead to getting the job done and providing dignity, treatment, care, and respect for our neighbors experiencing homelessness, while also building rapport and working with house residents and small business owners who have also experienced issues that are related to the state of homelessness in the city and to do so in a way that leads all parties satisfied.

So I'm looking forward to that conversation.

The next part of the agenda is public comment and I believe there's still no public comment or signed up unless in the last minute someone signed up.

Is that the case?

There are no public comment or signed up.

Okay, well, in that case, we will skip public comment as there is no one signed up today to provide public comment.

Certainly appreciate any follow up written questions or written comments on the presentation today to be sent to my office and happy to distribute to other committee members as well as members of the general public would like to indicate in written comment and feedback.

So moving on then to items of business.

Mr. Clerk, will you please read item one into the record?

Best care, the development and impact of a multifaceted collected impact model.

Before we begin our presentations, I'd like to ask our presenters to join us at the virtual table and give their name, background, and introduction before we jump into it.

Following the lead of our government affairs team, I ask that after you introduce yourself, you pass it forward to the next person on the panel until we're fully introduced.

So why don't we start with Catherine Beckett.

Good afternoon.

My name is Catherine Beckett.

I'm on the faculty at the University of Washington.

I'm in the Department of Sociology and also a chair and professor in Law, Societies, and Justice.

And it's great to be here with you today.

Unfortunately, I do not know who is next in terms of presenting.

So I don't know quite who to pass the baton to.

How about we pass it to Dominic Davis?

And then, Dom, you just pass it on to the next person after you introduce yourself.

I'm CEO and co-founder of BC, but most of you are from being the CEO and founder of Community Passageways.

I'll pass it over to Victor.

Victor, are you with us?

Victor may not be on yet.

Hi, everybody.

Good afternoon.

Thanks for having us back.

I'm Jessie Benet, the Deputy Director at the Public Defender Association, mostly deployed to our COLEAD project and here with some of my amazing colleagues that I've been working with in our coalition for the Just Care Project.

And I'll hand it off to Ramon.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Ramon Hernandez.

I am a Special Project Manager with COLEAD.

excited to be here this afternoon with you guys.

And I will pass it off to Lisa, or she hasn't gone already.

I don't think Lisa's in this version of it.

It looks like Victor is probably trying to get into the meeting.

So momentarily, we will have the person that needs no introduction, Victor Liu of Asian Counseling and Referral Services and Brand newly minted Chief Executive Officer at Seattle Counseling Services.

So Victor should be here momentarily.

And when he joins, we can just do introduction with his part of the agenda if we want to go ahead and get started.

Okay, why don't we just proceed into this first item on the agenda, the just care development impact and multifaceted collective impact model.

So I think the way I want to do this, if you guys want to go ahead and and gear up your presentation.

And then reserve questions until the end of the presentation.

That would be my preference.

I do just want to flag for everyone.

The 2nd item is going to be a provider panel where we can also ask more specific questions about.

the particular roles of some of the constituent providers that are present today.

They're parsed into two separate agenda items, though I realize there might be some overlap between them.

But why don't we just go ahead and jump into this one here, and let's hold questions until the conclusion of the presentation.

All right, thank you very much.

So again, my name is Catherine Beckett.

I'm on the faculty at the University of Washington.

And what I'll be sharing with you today are the results of a developmental and impact evaluation of the first year of operations.

If you include the early operations of CoLEAD, which then became a sort of part, a key part of Just Care.

This was very much a collective effort and the members of the team, the research team are listed here.

And I want to give a shout out to all the people who contributed to the research project.

And also, thanks to the groups and entities that provided funding for this research.

Those include the Blue Meridian Partners, the University of Washington West Coast Poverty Center, the family of Frank Miyamoto, and a generous gift from Lori Black and Stafford Mays.

So thanks so much to all.

And really what I want to talk about today is what Just Care is, how we came to understand what Just Care is, what are some of the unique features of it that differentiate it from other models that are springing up around the country, and then some of our key findings.

I think that you received about 25 slides from me.

I don't have time to go carefully over each of them.

So I will be going fast through some parts, but I'm happy to answer any questions over sections that I move quickly through.

We came to understand Just Care as a multifaceted collective impact model.

Collective impact models, I'll say more about in a moment.

What I mean by multifaceted is that Just Care is unique in that it is trying to do a bunch of things all at the same time and kind of provides a model for how to do that.

So it's not only addressing houselessness and homelessness, but also- I'm sorry, I don't think we have the slide deck up here.

I think that Jacob was gonna do it.

Jacob, is that still the case?

That was my understanding.

Would you like me to share the slides?

Unless Catherine, you'd like to do it.

I am currently sharing, but apparently you can't see them.

And I'm not sure why that would be the case.

I can unshare and try again and see if that.

Yeah.

Or IT can.

Yeah, there we go.

OK, here we go.

Yeah, I see.

All right.

Thank you.

Sorry for the interruption.

No, no, I'm glad you did.

Thank you.

Yes, there we are.

OK, so.

Moving on to the multifaceted nature of Just Care.

I think one of the things that makes it unique is that it's addressing a range of issues that are often unhelpfully siloed and treated separately when in fact that doesn't match the reality of people's lives.

So it's a housing first initiative, but it's also a health initiative that's seeking to reduce barriers.

to access to healthcare for underserved people.

It's a public safety initiative.

It works to reduce crime and improve public safety for both individuals and in neighborhoods.

But it also does that without reliance on the criminal legal system and without the police.

And in many ways actually facilitates decarceration by serving as an alternative to 911 and generally reducing what I'll call the police ability of behavioral health issues.

And throughout all of these different foci, we came to see that Just Care is very much animated by a commitment to racial equity and justice, as well as to harm reduction.

So when I say that we came to conceptualize Just Care as a collective impact model, what we mean is that This is a cross-sector collaboration involving a number of different organizations, and the icons are listed here, that came together to address a really complex set of social problems that were rapidly evolving and in many ways worsening under the conditions of the pandemic.

PDA, as you know, serves as that sort of backbone function in this coalition.

which is a very important role and does many things, including facilitating communication across the partners, and also does work like bringing in 27 different agencies into the encampments to make sure that various needs are met in the encampments.

I've described the Division of Labor here on this screen, so the street-based outreach aspect of the work is conducted by REACH and by LEAD.

They do this work both in encampments and in neighborhoods with business owners, nonprofits, and housed residents.

Then once people are moved into the hotels, there are a number of different service providers, CoLEAD, ACRS, and Chief Seattle Club.

And a couple of things are really notable about the work that they do in the hotels.

I'll say more about this.

Each of these organizations hires a very diverse staff with relevant lived experience, a long-term experience with harm reduction as well.

And all of them adopt a trauma-informed approach to the work that they do with people in the hotels, and all work to help people kind of stabilize, meet basic needs, and address longstanding issues so that they are better able to move toward independent living.

And then most recently, Wheeler Davis conglomerate, and you'll hear from Don in a little bit, has been adding safety services.

The safety teams work in the hotels, especially in the evenings, to ensure safety in and around the hotels.

And that's a really crucial and also, I think, unique feature of Just Care.

And again, that one of the things that does in addition to promoting public safety is creates a possible resolution of disputes and conflicts and disruptions that may occur, especially at night, without relying on the police or 911, wherever possible.

I know that there's a lot of conversation about things that are happening across the country to address homelessness and related social issues.

As I've mentioned, I think this holistic approach sets Just Care apart from many of the others that we're seeing.

I think it's also worth noting that Just Care intentionally sought and does work with people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, and I'll show you some data later that suggests that this is an especially vulnerable population, and this is therefore especially labor-intensive work that's being done.

I think just cares focus on both individual well being but also neighborhood well being also sets it apart from other things that are happening around the country.

As far as we could determine the fact that just care is able to coordinate with legal system actors and resolve outstanding warrants old cases and so forth.

is also relatively unique and really builds on the relationships that LEAD has established over the years with legal officials.

The provision of onsite medical care and coordination of care for complex cases appears to be unique as well.

And then finally, I think it's notable that all the Just Care providers working in the hotels are able to significantly enhance people's access to all forms of treatment, but especially to medication-assisted treatment.

This is the part I'm going to skip through really fast.

This is about our data and our data collection process.

We did a bunch of interviews with many people, with participants we had.

I think this is listed on this slide.

We interviewed 42 Just Care participants, many of them multiple times.

And the questions we asked focused on the topics that are listed here in the slide.

And then these transcripts were then transcribed by professional transcriptionists and imported into a qualitative data software program.

And we also interviewed 11 community partners, ranging from the people with the Downtown Seattle Association, various business improvement districts, et cetera, as you can see listed here on this slide.

We did 12 additional interviews with Just Care outreach responders and other providers.

We, as I mentioned earlier, we also interviewed leaders of central organizations, including ACRS, Chief Seattle Club, and CoLEAD, but also REACH and LEAD.

And then we spoke with seven leaders of alternative crisis models who are centrally involved in those initiatives across the country.

We were also able to obtain some administrative data, which I'll be presenting a little bit of, and then also 911 call data from the Seattle Police Department.

I wanted to start by just giving a quick snapshot of who Just Care is serving, and this is current as of February 28, 2021, so of course these figures will change slightly over time.

The important takeaway, I think, here is that the Just Care population is about two-thirds BIPOC and slightly disproportionately male, which is actually consistent with what we know about people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

And there's quite an age range.

It's all adults, but ranging in age from 20 to 74. So I'll shift now to our key findings.

One of the key points I'd like to emphasize is that The idea that people who are living unsheltered or experiencing unsheltered homelessness are housing or service resistant does not borne out by the data.

The breach and others who are screening people in the encampments determined that only 3% of the people they encountered were not a good fit with hotel living, and only 13 have been exited from hotels once brought into the hotels.

And I, or perhaps other people, can say more about those rare occasions when that does happen.

But the take-home point here is that the overwhelming majority of people are able to move into the hotels and are able to safely remain in the hotels over a period of time.

This and I'll just I know you have this Council members, so I won't belabor this but again these data just kind of support that previous point that I mentioned.

One of the key things that Just Care does is it really focuses on addressing a range of issues that present obstacles for people to stabilize their lives and secure long-term permanent housing.

So case managers, outreach workers, outreach responders work hard with Just Care participants to do all of the things that are listed on the left side of this slide.

And we found through our interviews with participants that virtually everyone we spoke with was engaging in at least one of these activities actively, and in most cases, pursuing a number of these different goals.

And again, the important point here is that this respite, this interim housing situation with the support that Just Care provides enables people to address these issues, which in turn enable them to pursue things like permanent housing.

This table just kind of illustrates the points that I was saying.

And these data here are based on co-leads specifically because they were not available for the other programs at the time we did this data collection.

We did, however, so on the one hand, when we spoke to participants, they expressed this just tremendous sense of relief and almost euphoria that they were housed, not only housed, but housed safely.

in a place that afforded them dignity and security and privacy.

And this just, I mean, I can't say enough words to convey how deeply felt and appreciated this was by participants.

So clear payoff in terms of emotional well-being and psychic well-being for participants.

At the same time, there was this awareness, and this was true also for the outreach responders we spoke to, that this was a temporary thing.

Nobody knew how long it was going to be around and that people could be, it could end at any moment.

So there was this paradox that we found that was quite pronounced about, on the one hand, this tremendous sense of relief and security, and on the other hand, this ongoing concern.

And this concern tended to grow the later, the longer the interviews went on, because people were aware of the precarity of the situation.

We also found that Just Care is effectively and significantly reducing barriers to access to medical care.

This is a population, and this is true of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in general, but this is a population that has extensive medical needs, both mental health and physical health, and in most cases also substance abuse, substance use disorder.

And so the fact that they're able to provide this on-site care and coordination for more complex health needs is just really transformative for people.

And we have many, many examples that I'd be happy to share if people have questions.

The fact that Just Care participants have significant health needs is not unique.

This is representative and typical among people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, as these data show.

These are the data specifically for Just Care participants that we spoke with.

These are the conditions that they identified themselves as having.

So you can see that many people had more than one significant physical and mental health condition.

In terms of MAT, we found that access to MAT was greatly enhanced.

This was useful for some people.

There's a lot to say about substance use disorder and treatment.

I'll be happy to do that if people are interested in that.

MAT was especially useful for some people, particularly opiate users.

It's not a panacea, but it can be a very helpful tool.

And there is an important limitation there that it's difficult to use in cases of alcohol dependence or for people who use stimulants.

primarily.

We also found that Just Care is significantly improving public safety and quality of life, both for participants and for neighbors.

And it's doing this work in a number of different ways.

First of all, just by moving people out of encampments.

I won't say too much about this.

I think this is well understood, but encampments are dangerous places.

for a whole variety of reasons.

There's a lot of victimization going on.

And I think other folks who will be speaking later can say more about that.

So a lot of theft, but also a lot of more serious forms of victimization in the encampments themselves.

And the encampments themselves also create public safety and quality of life issues for house residents.

So simply by moving people out of encampments, Just Care is doing a lot of important public safety work.

It also enhances feelings of safety and quality of life for neighbors, both by again addressing the encampments, but also more generally by providing a place people can go to express their concerns, to strategize around sanitation issues and other kinds of quality of life issues.

And one of the things that was really striking in our interviews with community partners is There was, they also expressed a tremendous sense of relief that there's someone we can call who will respond, but they will respond in a way that we feel good about.

We don't like the idea of a sweep.

We don't want to just throw people back in jail, but we do want something done.

And this met our needs in terms of addressing our safety concerns and quality of life concerns, but also getting people the services that they need.

So that was a very powerful theme in the interviews.

And then, in addition, Just Care seeks to improve public safety and we believe does improve public safety by meeting people's basic needs in the hotel.

So the theory of change here is that if people don't need to steal to feed themselves and so forth, then they will rely on illicit survival strategies less.

And that is definitely borne out in our data.

It's among the people who acknowledge that they sometimes previously relied on illicit survival strategies, virtually all of them described a radical reduction in those behaviors once brought into the hotels.

And the outreach responders we spoke with confirmed that, and that was consistent with their perception as well.

And this makes, I think, good sense.

There's a slight wrinkle or caveat around for people who continue to experience substance use disorders for whom treatment was not yet available or an option.

That's a sort of complication.

But overall, in the aggregate, there appears to be a very notable reduction in theft and other kinds of illicit survival strategies.

And then finally, by utilizing de-escalation strategies and creative problem solving in the hotels, we believe that Just Care is dramatically improving public safety.

This was true among the program staff and the providers we spoke with, a really creative use of de-escalation, all sorts of examples in the full report.

And then also, of course, the safety teams, and I know you'll hear from Dom in just a few minutes, but the safety teams also relying on alternatives other than 9-1-1 to keep things calm and keep people happy in the hotel setting.

So in all of those ways, we believe that 9-1-1, excuse me, Just Care is improving public safety.

This is consistent with our 9-1-1 call data analysis.

We can't draw any strong causal, we can't make any strong causal claims here, but what we can say is that The number of calls associated with the areas where the encampments were, from which people were moved out of encampments, were lower in 2021 than they were in 2020 by the percent shown there.

And also that there was no commensurate increase in the hotels.

So we believe this provides additional confirmation of these public safety benefits.

And then a key set of final findings has to do with the sort of decarcerative impact of Just Care.

Just Care providers are working hard to both serve as an alternative to 911 in neighborhoods, and then also to avoid relying on 911 in the hotels.

And this, of course, is the front door to the system so that in that way, it has a decarcerative impact.

And I think significantly and importantly, the work that Just Care is doing in communities and neighborhoods in responding to and engaging with community partners is also important from sort of a longer term cultural standpoint is enabling people to understand how and why the police are not necessarily the best response to the issues that they face in their neighborhoods and that there are others that can provide satisfying responses to those issues.

So overall, these are our conclusions.

We think that Just Care offers an innovative, holistic, and effective way of addressing a whole range of issues that are bound up with unsheltered homelessness.

And I think, again, serves as a really important model for how to address all of those issues at one time, which is, in our estimation, a very rare and novel kind of feature of the program.

We also think it's important that it meets the needs of both participants and neighborhoods.

and that it has a variety of advantages over the sort of cahoots model of short-term crisis response that are like, you know, spreading across the country as we see, and I'm happy to say more about that if people would be interested.

Thank you very much for your time.

Dr. Beckett, thank you so much.

I actually wanna follow up on that last comment you made a little bit, because my understanding of sort of the difference of what Just Care is doing versus like a model like CAHOOTS is that Just Care has even more integration of resource to solve for a bigger variety of things.

So it's sort of like a CAHOOTS plus in some respect almost.

But correct me if I'm wrong on that or feel free to expand as you just offered to, because I think that is a really good point.

And I think we should take a second to expand on that.

Yeah, I think that your characterization is accurate.

And so there are, you know, and many people who work with just with the cahoots type models will say, it's really unfortunate we can respond in the moment and we have prevented a police encounter with a vulnerable person, which is great.

But often there's no place to take that person.

There's nothing else they can do.

There are some initiatives I'm aware of around the country where they are trying to pair that kind of immediate crisis response.

with support, but you're right, the CAHOOTS model itself doesn't come with those longer term kinds of resources and support.

And I think the other advantage is that, you know, because there's sort of a neighborhood level focus in Just Care, so Just Care builds relationships with people who are in neighborhoods for long periods of time.

and provides a sort of longer term way of approaching a whole range of issues that might be presenting in a neighborhood.

As opposed to individuals calling 911 and then having two or 3% of those calls rerouted, there isn't that same neighborhood level benefit.

Those calls will be dispersed over a wide geographic space.

So you just don't get that same kind of geographic impact.

Thank you so much.

So why don't we open it up to other questions, colleagues.

If there's questions for Dr. Beckett on her presentation, I'm happy to entertain those.

Scanning for Council Member Peterson, please.

Thank you, Chair Lewis.

Thank you, Dr. Beckett.

I wanted to understand the geography of this current operation.

Where, where are they, where's just care going right now in the city.

Well, our data kind of end our data collection period it ended in February, March, so we may need to turn to Jesse or someone else to get any updates but as of that time the primary focus was in the CID and around the 7th.

between 7th and 8th and Jackson, right in that area, and then in the Pioneer Square area, especially 2nd Avenue Extension South.

But I know there have been a few sort of other small outreach efforts in various parks, and so maybe Jesse could say more about those.

Jesse, you want to jump in on that?

Sure.

Yeah.

Our sort of legislated focus has been Pioneer Square and the CID.

We've done kind of a large focus at each one of those.

And then more recently, we worked a little bit at 10th and Dearborn in the CID, and we've been working all over Pioneer Square after 2nd Avenue Extension.

The big lift of work was done there.

We've worked around the pergola and there's some great success stories from the pergola area and some good collaboration with the HOPE team.

And then we've worked along 2nd and Main, 2nd and Washington and Occidental Park and several other kind of areas that orbit around kind of that core around Occidental Park.

Councilmember Peterson, do you have a follow up?

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for explaining the geography.

And then for for Dr. Beckett, I know I'm with a look back from an academic lens and you know looking at it critically in terms of the the benefits and the outcomes and is there anything that is there anything to to add to your analysis in terms of Like what could be done, you know, are there areas of improvement or something that you would?

Because it's it's it's very positive what you're presenting here, which is great I just wanted to offer that space for is there anything that mm-hmm from your rigorous analysis of this, what else could be done or what else would you recommend?

You know, there were a few we offer a few small suggestions in terms of sort of program operation.

And some of these things we actually shared with with the team kind of along the way and then made modifications in real time.

So they actually kind of don't end up in the final report, but or they do like in a footnote.

But so one example was we did learn fairly early on in our research, we were hearing from some of the people that we were interviewing that they weren't getting enough food.

And we shared that finding and Co-lead and other providers responded very, very quickly and tried to figure out how do you do that in a hotel without a kitchenette and experimented with different responses and then ended up addressing the issue.

So that's the way in which it was also a developmental evaluation as we were sort of giving some feedback in real time.

So some of those improvements have already happened, I would say, you know, I don't other than those things which we've shared and which are written up in our sort of lessons learned section of the report.

We don't have a lot of criticism because we feel like the interviews with participants were pretty overwhelmingly positive.

And of course, you know, certain people had certain issues with there were sometimes people would say, you know, there might be maybe good to have more separation in the hotels between people who are continuing to use and people who are trying to be sober.

things like that, but the overall sort of response was incredibly powerfully positive and we could see for the people we were able to track over time, some of the improvements that were happening in their lives.

I don't want to paint.

I mean, we can't have our, I think we have to be clear right about the fact that substance use disorder is a chronic health issue and it takes time to address and not everyone will be able to do it in the way that might look like success to other people.

But in those cases, I think the harm reduction measures that were taken were really, really powerful in terms of saving people's lives, reducing harm, reducing disruption, and so forth.

Thank you, I'll take a look at that report.

I just see that presentation online, but it's circulated separately.

The report will be circulated shortly.

It is actually undergoing copy editing as we speak.

So it should be ready any day now.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I did just want to ask maybe a process question related to that.

Will there be continued assessment of the Just Care Program ongoing?

Dr. Beckett, with your research, to continue along on, because I think that, I mean, this assessment is also just helpful for the public record and just for demonstrating the efficacy of a lot of the things the program is doing and is very validating.

Is there a plan to continue going on beyond the period where your current report ends?

We do offer in the report, which we'll get to shortly, we do offer a number of suggestions for data collection improvement, which I think would enable a more robust and comprehensive kind of analysis.

For example, we couldn't do a cost-benefit analysis with the information that was available to us.

And there are other things that we think could be really helpful, like doing pre- and post-health outcome comparisons.

So there's a whole list of recommendations for data collection that I think would enable ongoing analysis, but I'm not sure where things are with that.

We just sort of finished the report, so we're at that stage right now.

Thank you so much.

Are there any other questions, colleagues, for this portion of the agenda?

Council Member Strauss, were you raising your hand?

Yeah, there you go, please.

Go ahead.

Thank you, and Chair, maybe I can ask a clarifying question to best direct my questions.

In the next panel, is that going to be more, I guess, who's going to be in the next panel for, and should I be directing questions here or there?

Well, actually, I want to ask clarifications to the to the clerk, I guess in demarcating this between item 1 and item 2, are we going to get to more to Jesse and Dom and Victor on that panel?

Or do we want.

Or are they going to weigh in here and.

The first panel is the presentation we just saw by Professor Beckett.

The second item on the agenda is a provider panel with Jesse and Victor and Dominique.

Great.

Yes.

So Council Member Strauss, if you just hold your questions, I guess for now, I mean, we're just going to do questions within the four corners of this PowerPoint and move forward.

I understand there is sort of some bleeding because Jesse's been jumping in on a few, but the intent is, for that to be more the next panel.

So are there any other questions on this PowerPoint?

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you so much.

Let's see here.

I do have two questions, and I hope I'm talking about something that we've already discussed, because I also, like Council Member Strauss, have sort of lost my way.

We have discussed slide 10 and slide 11, correct?

And you want to stop me when I don't have the number?

I can't see the numbers.

Yeah, I think when I prepared notes for this as well, we were just literally counting the slides because they weren't numbered.

Okay, I'll start at the beginning and count.

So on slide 10, the bullet related to the 13% of folks who have been exited from hotels.

Just wondering what the definition of exited is.

Does that mean that somebody was asked or required to leave a hotel?

Yes.

Or does it mean they found permanent housing somewhere?

Yeah, so this doesn't include folks who have found permanent housing.

By exited, I mean this is sort of an involuntary exiting.

The providers, I think, can say more about this.

My understanding about sort of the reasons behind those decisions were, in a few cases, there were domestic violence situations.

There was a situation where an older gentleman developed post-COVID dementia and needed a form of care that simply couldn't be provided in the hotel.

There was a case where a participant was continuing to deal drugs in the hotel after repeated interventions persisted in that.

Those are the ones that I recall.

Council Member Herbold, there may be a few other types of reasons.

that's helpful.

I mean, I don't need to necessarily get in the weeds.

I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not they were involuntary exits or exits because there was a successful placement.

So that's very, very helpful.

On slide 11, just the, and I'm sorry if you covered this.

had my attention diverted when we were on slide 11. There's a reference to two people that were not offered Just Care Housing because they're already enrolled in LEAD.

Can you explain a little bit about why this would make them ineligible for housing?

My understanding is that they already had housing through LEAD.

LEAD often places people in motels and so forth.

So that's my understanding from the REACH providers that I spoke with.

And then just generally speaking, Can you just talk a little bit more, I think you've touched on it somewhat, but what your research has shown about the systems gaps that impact the effectiveness of Just Cares?

This is one of the longest sections of the reports.

So I can't unfortunately say too much.

I mean, some of the really obvious ones have to do with the paucity of permanent housing, both permanent supportive and just affordable permanent housing.

This casts an enormous shadow over everything and makes it, you know, even once people have gotten their identification and are back on the waiting lists and have addressed outstanding legal issues and, you know, then they still are just, and gotten back their benefits, and there's still nothing, right?

There's still this waiting period.

And so that's just a kind of structural constraint that casts a long shadow over the whole situation.

And that's really helpful because it's not just barriers to accessing housing because of the individual circumstances of individuals, it is just The lack of housing options, even for people who have who have addressed the things that traditionally might be considered barriers.

Yes, exactly.

And I think one of the other this this is hard to capture whether this is a exactly a system gap, but I think it arguably is.

One of the things that we learned talking to outreach responders is just how labor intensive it is to do things like get people reconnected to the benefits to which they are entitled.

Just an enormous amount of labor, super confusing and frustrating labor, interacting with many bureaucrats over many phone calls and It's just so difficult, time consuming, and complicated.

And I don't know how someone could ever manage to do that while living on the streets.

It just doesn't seem humanly possible to me.

Even the outreach responders who have been trained and are doing this all the time find it to be challenging and frustrating and logistically complicated.

And same thing goes for accessing mental health treatment and all sorts of other issues that they deal with.

So yeah.

Thank you.

Yes.

All right.

Council Member Morales.

Well, I think my questions are really for the providers, but I do just want to take this opportunity to say that in the calls that my office receives, it's really clear that there is a huge appetite among our community for any sort of program that can address the needs of our neighbors.

And I think we have all heard from constituents who say that they want somebody to call.

They don't necessarily want to call the police, but even when they do call the police, they don't come.

And so what we're hearing is that people are just really thankful that there is a program like this, you know, where there are a bunch of different providers working together to try to address some of these really acute problems that are happening.

I think this is crisis intervention work.

It's housing connection and support.

It is substance abuse referrals.

And these are all the kinds of things that we need to see more of so that we can begin to address the kind of chronic homelessness challenges that we're seeing.

And then, as you were saying, Dr. Bennett, the gap in housing is really the next or the current important step for us to take in order to really start to see an acute solution to these problems.

So I do have some questions, but as I'm looking through my notes here, I'm realizing that they are probably better suited for the next panel.

So I will hold those for them.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Are there any final questions for Dr. Beckett on the presentation?

HAB-Danny Teodoru, Moderator): Okay, seeing Oh Councilmember straps.

HAB-Danny Teodoru, Moderator): Yes, sorry, I was gonna follow up my last round attempted questions with just a statement that Thank you, Dr Beckett and thank you to all the service providers that we're about to hear from for providing and.

an example of how this works and how it works well when we truly do provide four walls, a door that somebody can walk, the space that they need to stabilize, and the services that they need to stabilize as well.

So I just want to thank you all.

This is the example that demonstrates that we can have success when we provide the correct supports that are needed to address the crisis before us.

So just thank you very much, Dr. Beckett, for all your work and for putting it Dave Kuntz, OSBT — He, Him, Hisssssssssssssssssssssssssss

I just want to thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Sorry, I popped it out right when I was about to say thank you as well to the panelists.

Really want to lift up the investments that King County Council just made as of yesterday.

And I know that from the very beginning, when we were considering allocation of the ARPA funds, one of the most important things for us and the chair of the committee here was making sure that we were acting as good partners, especially for programs that could look like Just Cares and to make sure that we stepped in and provided additional funding.

So I'm very happy to see that the council has allocated the 7.5 and as a precursor folks may know we're releasing our ARPA funds tomorrow and we are keeping our word to match those dollars as well because we want to see programs like this brought to scale.

So thanks so much to all of you for helping to educate people about the importance of programs like Just Cares and to the good chair for his ongoing stewardship of these conversations so that there can be clarification and a good conversation around the type of programs that are working.

And Just Cares is an excellent model of what works, so we need to fund it.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Mosqueda, and thank you for your leadership on that.

You know, that's why we come to the Select Committee on Homelessness, to break news.

So you heard it here first, folks, from the chair of the Budget Committee.

What's coming soon?

Okay, well, why don't we then pivot to the next item here?

I really profoundly want to thank Dr. Beckett for giving this presentation.

I can't stress enough how helpful this research and this information is for us as policymakers as we delve into this work more throughout this year.

And this provides a very strong analytical foundation to what we're doing here.

So I know that our central staff here will be deeply appreciated because whenever we have empirical information to guide our policy decisions, it just helps all of us and it helps the public get behind things that we know empirically are working.

So thank you so much for this presentation and thanks for taking the time this afternoon to be with us.

My pleasure.

Okay, so why don't we pivot here to our provider panel.

So Mr. Clerk, would you please read item two into the agenda?

Just Care Provider Panel.

There we go.

All right, well, why don't we have the panelists, they introduced themselves in the previous item, but why don't we just to get everyone up to speed again, do a round of introductions.

So Jesse, why don't we start with you and then pass it off to the next person until we have the whole panel ready to go.

Certainly, and we have a backdrop for our introductions if it's no trouble that Jacob has to put up, and that's our actual cost of Just Care.

We're still kind of fighting back some misinformation out there in the media, so we really want to be clear.

We'll put this up throughout the deck and at the end, but we want to be clear that the actual cost of this intervention, which includes the hotel and the services, is $49,000 a year, not the $128,000 that's been out there.

Thanks for putting that up, Jacob.

I'm Jesse Benet, and I'm here with some amazing folks.

I'm the Deputy Director at the Public Defender Association, and I've been lucky enough to work on COLEAD and Just Care this past year, and I'm going to pass it off to Dom.

Hello, everybody.

I'm Dominic Davis, one of the co-founders of WDC.

I want to start off by saying that this model that I've witnessed, that I've been around, that I've watched, it's actually working.

I think one of the misnomers is that And not a lot of people of color are being served as what I've been hearing, but doing this work and partnering with these guys over the number of years that I've been collaborating with them, there's a whole lot of people of color.

I actually, BIPOC communities are being served higher than any other community.

Like, I'm seeing that at a high level.

And things that I really like the most about this model is As we're dealing with doing community safety in the hotels, we are actually seeing black males being served at a very high level.

Black males with mental health issues and homelessness issues, like the things dealing with, black males don't get a lot of focus, right?

The only thing we get focused on is the criminal justice system and unemployment, right?

But this model addresses these issues that are being faced and gives black males an opportunity to get on their feet.

WDC has been able to hire a team of BIPOC people to do this work in Just Care and do this work at a very high level.

We have close to 16 or 17 employees so far and we've only partnered with them for a matter of a few months and we've been able to pay a very well a very good living wage and provide a health care package for people of color that normally wouldn't have an opportunity to make this kind of money.

We've been able to provide training and skills for people that normally wouldn't get these kind of skills and training.

We're literally bringing economic structure into the community through this organization and this partnership with Just Cares.

We are able to do de-escalation work at a level that other people can't do because of the fact that we're hiring people with lived experiences and that have been through the criminal justice system, have served, have been in the streets.

They're serving the same population that they are from, that they are part of.

So now you have people de-escalating with other people that are part of the same community and the same background.

We've been able to de-escalate very high-level issues and situations to keep the participants safe, the staff at the hotel safe, and the COLE staff safe.

We've been able to be that buffer between everybody.

And what's crazy about it is we know a lot of the people that come through the program.

Our team knows them.

We have relationship with them before they even get in the program.

They know each other.

I've had people that I've served and worked with in the past, young adults, young men, young women, who have been, have been, we've referred to, co-lead, and that we put in the program.

We've even seen some of the parents of some of the people that we've connected to in co-lead.

and just cares, and going through all these different hotels and working with Victor and her team.

But it's just amazing to see the way we've been able to build a small village.

It's about relationship.

And that's how de-escalation happens.

So now you don't have to call the police.

Now when high-level issues happen, they're not calling 911. Now when issues and situations are going down, you don't have a person with a badge and a gun showing up to do de-escalation or try to come in with trying to establish authority with a black male who has mental health issues.

You know the results of that nine times out of 10. So I want to say that the fact that we're partnering with these guys, collaborating with these guys, and working with these guys, we have a model that works that we step to, and we brought a model that works into a model that works.

So now we're collaborating at a very high level, and we're showing what it looks like for community to be able to bring security and safety into community on a bigger scale.

This is a small model of what we can actually do and grow into our society, into our communities that we're talking about, deescalating and pulling back on police force.

We're showing what the model could actually look like.

I wanted to say at the end of my presentation is, We have to expand this.

And then I'm going to be selfish here.

I want to expand this because if we expand this and we fund this, I can hire a lot more people from the BIPOC communities and give them a lot more training, put more money in their pockets so they can take care of their bills and their families.

put their kids in good schools, make sure they're in a good space where they can move into nice apartments or homes.

We want to give people economic structure.

That's me being stingy.

The other part on a higher level, bringing a sample of community healing, community and community keeping community safe.

That's what it's all about.

So we want to keep building this and keep building on this and keep growing this to where we can address the homelessness issues, the health issues that we're dealing with.

They're pulling people off the streets.

I've been in the streets, me and my team been in the streets with them, watching them do outreach, aiding them in outreach.

And it's amazing.

It's amazing to see what, and the next thing you know, we're pulling up in our vans and providing transportation to get people in the hotels and clearing out whole encampments.

It's been blowing my mind to watch these guys the way they work.

It's been blowing my mind to be in collaboration with them.

I know there's other people that want to try to emulate this model.

Okay, so grow this model.

Let's partner with other people and help them grow their models so we can address this issue on a whole nother level, on a systemic level, on a community level, and on a statewide level.

I'm done.

Thank you so much.

Do we have a few more panelists that need to be introduced?

Yeah, we have Victor and Ramon, and then we have a deck, but Dom already presented for us, so we're good.

Okay, how about this?

I love working with you, Dom.

Let's get Victor and Ramon on the record here, and then let's pivot to the slide deck.

Sounds great.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Again, my name is Victor Lu.

For this work context, I use he, him, his pronouns.

I'm from Asian Counseling and Referral Service, ACRS.

I always say, Dom, my brother, you are the passion.

I'm the heart of Just Care.

So I will be leading the conversation with my heart as we go along.

And of course, I'm going to pivot it to Ramon.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Ramon Hernandez, Special Projects Manager at CoLEAD.

And I would just like to iterate what Victor was saying.

Dom, you got me pretty stoked right now.

I'm pretty motivated.

You got this room energized.

All right, well here, why don't we then, I don't know who wants to take the lead for this slide deck.

Is that you, Jessie?

Am I turning it back over to you?

I think Victor is gonna kick us off today.

And so you can probably go right into the second slide.

And then when we get to the picture, slide number five, Ramon will dip in.

Sounds great.

So I'm just going to describe, as I was jokingly saying that Dom is the passion, I'm the heart, but kidding aside, I think I'm really the heart of Just Care in some way.

So I'm going to talk about the service of care, the model of care, the Just Care consortium of partners work together on.

When people ask me to describe the model of Just Care, I use three words, compassion, respect, and integrity.

And that's how we provide services to the BIPOC, individuals who are unsheltered with chronic mental health, substance use disorder issues.

And so I'm going to kind of walk you through the process of Just Care.

So early on, you heard about the partners.

We have Evergreen Treatment Services REACH program.

Essentially, the staff goes to the encampment, work directly with the clients, identify the ones that have priorities, needs, and then they got referred to service providers such as ACRS and CHIPS, the other clubs.

mostly based on culture relevancy, language relevancy, as well as the conditions of the mental health and substance use disorder.

As a service providers from ACRS, in this model of care, we are the only licensed behavioral health provider.

So we serve the highest acuity mental health and substance use disorder services.

And what I love about this model, it is during the pandemic, there's really increased needs for substance use and mental health.

services, and historically, the BIPOC community has always faced more institutional barriers and racism.

But the pandemic had magnified that.

And the Just Care model allows us to respond rapidly, provide open access, timely access, when care is needed, and deliver that care when it's most helpful to the individual.

The collective team in this consortium, with all the service providers, all of us All of us, I want to say that most of us are from the BIPOC community with lived experience.

It is a multidisciplinary team.

I saw in the chat that there's a request to move to slide two, so move to slide two, please.

But we are a multidisciplinary team that really consists of licensed behavioral health providers that has expertise in mental health, substance use disorder, and I really reference the culture competency care that we have as a coalition to serve this community.

What is culture?

competent care.

Cultural competent care is the ability to address social determinants of health, primary health, behavior health, and balancing the body and mind and spirits of that individual.

And through that process of the Just Care Model of Care, we have demonstrated in a short period of time, not only can we respond rapidly, but we're able to reduce the 911 call that Dr. Becker referenced, reduce the recidivism, Because as a service provider, we actually have the ability to track the utilizations of urgent care back in jail.

And in a short period of time, we have demonstrated that the model of care works effectively to address this issue.

It is a 24-7, 24-hour care.

Providing hotel-based services is a wonderful model.

However, by providing the room and the space without providing 24-7 behavioral health care, is not going to work.

That is why it's so critical that Just Care program provide a 24-7 behavior health care for individual, have the ability to link individual for primary care, dental care, as well as vision care.

And sharing what we have done now, so it is definitely a trauma-informed approach.

A lot of the clients that we serve right now, as we referenced earlier, are from the Black community.

And historically, again, I want to emphasize that this is a marginalized community.

which already have a lot of trauma in their life path.

And our intention through this model of care really is to support individuals to have a path that they can exit out from the hotel to get sustainable housing.

And we are very fortunate that we have housing partners to really support the work that we do and to assist individuals to get the housing that we need.

We also recognize that After the housing is being provided, oh, that's our team, our beautiful team with the different partners.

But by providing somebody, when they get exited housing, we need to continue to provide the behavioral health care that they need.

We have clients who have exited from the Just Care program that wants to continue to receive the behavioral health counseling treatment.

They requested it.

That speaks volume to the work that our staff do together, that the clients actually want to continue that care so it doesn't repeat into the cycle when somebody ends up back on the streets again.

And early on, there was a slide that shows about the cost effectiveness of the Just Care program.

And I want to reiterate why this program is very effective beyond just costing about $49,500 per client per year.

I had done some brief cost analysis that I had shared with the council members before that.

A conservative saving, for each client, we are looking at a cost saving of $22,600 per client per year by preventing them from going back to the jail, preventing them from needing to use hospitals, urgent care, and also because we are already providing the mental health care and substance use disorder care, it actually is really cost efficient.

And one thing that I'm really, really concerned now as a service provider that The current funding for Just Care program is going to end on July 1, that magic date.

We are counting down that date very anxiously, worrying about the successful intervention and stability we have already provided for the clients, which is why we want to ensure that this program is not only going to be sustained prior to that date, but has stability and like Dong said, have the ability to expand because we have proven that a community approach works better than a health navigation or a law enforcement approach.

We treat people with humanity and with promising practices that is really critical.

If the funding is going to be supported, not if, when the funding is going to be supported to beyond expand this program, we are looking at the ability to have at least 288 rooms a year, serving about 400 clients a year.

So we would really urge you, and we are grateful for the city council support already, but ensuring that do not put our clients in jeopardy before that July 1 deadline.

We really need to stabilize what we have right now in order to make it work.

I want to end this with two client stories that I would like to share.

So there was a close to 70-year-old Black individual who has been unsheltered for over seven years.

sorry so very recently he got housing and just moved out from the hotel and what he wrote a note to our staff and this is what he shared that i'm going to summarize he did not believe that a program like just care program had can exist he called this program heaven where he had met angels angels and angels in his life that really just touches my heart about how that can happened and after he moved, he actually moved recently, we helped him to move to his housing.

He's one of those participants that requested to continue service with us.

A second story that I would share is there was a pregnant individual with her partner who was sleeping at a bus stop near Aidan Jackson and Cameron.

I asked her why at the time she's sleeping at the bus stop.

And the reason is because there's no more tents in there and Cameron.

She was almost due to give birth at that time.

And we were very glad that with our partner, we've reached program.

We were able to get her into the hotel.

Very recently, she gave birth to a healthy boy.

And it's just shows me that the program is not only changing life.

It is transforming life.

Her partner and her also recently got housing that really bring joy to me and our partners who work on this together.

She also left a note and shared the stories with us that the Just Care program is effective.

And she is going back to the encampment to tell the participant, the individual who are living in the encampment about how this model of care work.

So I'm just going to end on that happy note with that two client story.

Thank you, Victor.

Definitely.

As you look at our staff here, I just want to highlight that our staff is of just a multiculturally diverse.

We have many women that identify with LGBTQ community.

And these are the communities that have been historically marginalized, which is the population, a lot of the population that we serve.

Just Care is working collaboratively with community organizations and the CID, with the Belltown Pioneer Square, also with business owners, and it's just the case management that we're able to outreach the folks on the streets, meet them where it's at.

It's housing first with the wraparound services.

We know that housing is not the end all solution.

That's why.

it's the case management piece.

We've heard through Professor Beckett's data, how like folks are getting connected to medical services who have chronic illnesses or have acute illnesses or connecting to individuals to mental health supports.

And I think it was Council Member Morales, or I think it was in something that Professor Beckett was mentioning, how folks who are experiencing mental health disability are unable to access a lot of their benefits that they are entitled.

In this case, I'm just recollecting an individual who was unable, because they were displaced, unable to get their SSI.

back on.

And it was just a long process.

And we're talking about somebody who could not just sit there on the phone.

And it was he would storm out of the room and come back.

And though it was it was several months before we were able to get him connected.

Now, had he not had the stability of a hotel, that might not have been possible.

He was ready to give up so much to the point where he didn't want to continue his mental health support.

He didn't want to continue his medical care.

So these are the things that this model does.

This model allows for us to stabilize individuals and begin to work on things that folks have issues with, like mental health, medical.

Also, Professor Beckett mentioned MAT.

A lot of individuals are experiencing a substance abuse disorder.

So this is a good place for that conversation to start, where a lot of times folks are out on the street living day-to-day, they really don't have a chance.

to catch a rest and think about tomorrow, next week, or a year from now, goals that they've always had in their heart to do.

So like a big part of what we do also is with our case managers.

It's like intensive case management.

They're in the hotels.

They're seeing everybody where they're at, the good, the bad, the ugly, day and night.

We have, we've just recently brought the Civic Online, which is fully staffed 24 hours a day.

with case managers, WDC there is overnight to make sure things are going well.

Also would like to mention kind of kind of all over the place, but WDC has played a really integral part in our program.

And what Don was mentioning, there was an individual who was hungry, he experiences mental health disability.

So he went to the hotel front area and he grabbed some food.

And the hotel clerk was pretty irate.

He followed the gentleman out into the parking lot, and there was an argument between them both.

I just happened to be on the call that evening, and I received a call from the clerk.

I was able to call WDC.

They responded.

The clerk had gone back into the hotel and called the authorities, but through WDC's mitigation, the clerk called the authorities and they were not dispatched any longer.

And that's just because of the work that they do.

And this was a black male and a black male that suffered from mental health disability.

And we know, as Don mentioned, the result of that can lead, unfortunately, to death.

In this case, a man did not go to jail, he was fed, and that was his thing.

He just wanted food.

And it wasn't escalated into something that it never needed to be.

Also, I'd just also like to highlight, it was mentioned here that one of the tremendous obstacles, as we know, in Seattle is housing.

And more so for folks that are experiencing homelessness and especially the avenues and the existing challenge, the channels that are there for them to access housing is that there's such a high barrier.

Our case managers are getting in and they're trying to figure out if it's not this path, where can I go?

doing a lot of research to connect folks.

And we're having individuals that are placing in long-term housing.

We've had an individual that was placed in the Second Ave Extension Project that was suffering from mental health disability, also with substance abuse disorder.

And through the program, he was able to stabilize.

With intensive case management, he was able to just begin to work on goals to move that forward in his life.

today, or not today, I think it was last month, he received the keys to his own apartment, you know, and he's living happily there.

And so that's just some of the things I believe that this program works.

And I want to mention this, my wife had mentioned to me, we were talking about some recent successes of mine.

And, you know, I was telling her that, you know, I, I what anybody can do that and she says something to me that really struck me and I believe it applies here, she said that you know a lot of people can run a marathon.

But only one person crosses the finish line first and this model works we're seeing results we're seeing that we've been here, since the beginning, since.

in the throes of the pandemic when we were running around trying to buy masks, sanitizers, gloves, and we were just in just utter disarray.

We've grown, we've learned, the data supports this model.

It supports that this model works.

And I would like to ask for the continued support of this model.

And I'll yield to Jesse with that.

Well, the main show has been had I'm trying to work with Jacob to kind of show you some of the other slides that we have, but I just want to remind folks that we're talking about people that have been turned away and often have extreme barriers accessing other systems.

I think Dom.

Underlying this and so did Ramon.

This is the lead population.

This is people that have had massive traumatic exposure to law enforcement and the criminal legal system who also have mental health disabilities.

substance use issues and are living outside unhoused.

And so a reminder that this is a particular population that, you know, one ask that we have is having other service providers join our ranks and do more of this work with us.

And this is a population that often gets marginalized, called service resistant, talked about they don't want services, services, they walk into emergency rooms and they're turned away.

So we really are talking about some of the most marginalized, primarily BIPOC folks and people living in extreme poverty that we want to take care of.

This is a population I haven't seen many other providers step up and ask to take care of in the way that we are now.

And we believe from a place of love and compassion that these folks deserve our utmost care and support and they deserve not only excellent health care and to come inside but they deserve to not they deserve to have the alternative response that Dom's team is providing.

We know many of the things that have happened and it, you know, there is a little bit of chaos, there is a little bit of stuff that goes down, but because of Don's team and how they show up and support our folks, we've actually been able to develop out not just a care-based response that we're doing in the hotels with COLEAD and ACRS, but an actual alternative to law enforcement coming.

And then I wanted to, we have a few slides left around some of the sites we've worked at.

They've already been talked about, but if we'll go two more slides ahead, Jacob.

This is a recent work we've done in White Center as part of our co-lead approach in Burien and White Center.

We're working with Dom's other hat, Community Passageways, to expand lead in White Center.

And to do that we wanted to start off with a big, a big bang and we worked at a an encampment that's caused a lot of heartache to the folks living there and the businesses around at 16th and Roxbury and we've been working there.

The last three weeks or so.

And we've applied what we call our just care approach.

And I want to unpack that a little bit.

And you can forward to the next slide, Jacob, that what our end result looks a lot like what one might think of when a sweep comes in.

And I really want to divorce ourselves from that approach.

We are not a sweep.

We are not disbursement.

We have a very specific approach that we take where we work with people for two weeks to a month.

We start out building relationship coming from a place of compassion and care.

We get to know the folks that are in encampments that we are targeting and working in.

We find out who they are.

We find out what they care about.

We find out their goals.

We wait a little bit of time and then we bring out more of an assessment approach.

We learn a little bit of information about them because they trust us.

And then we figure out how to match them to an appropriate response.

And then we do this thing we call moving day, where we work within partnership with the city and the clean team, but in a very person centered way people, people decide what they want to take with them to the hotel they decide what is trash that they want to leave behind and they decide if there's other things that they want to keep but maybe there's not room for them that they want to store.

They are front and center part of what goes, what stays.

They help push the items that need to be taken away to the street.

And then we've had a beautiful collaboration with SPU and Department of Neighborhoods and Parks that come out and pick up that debris, primarily that's been managed through relationships that the REACH program has with those entities.

And Nicole Alexander, who is our REACH front runner for this is on vacation, much deserved vacation this week, but it's really her and our outreach teams between COLEAD and the REACH program that do this approach.

And then we still get the same end result that everyone really wants, right?

We want people to come inside.

We want people to be treated well.

We want people to get access to resources.

We also want our sidewalks and businesses want people to be able to walk in through their front door.

I'm not sure what our time is, but if you want to go to the next couple slides, let's see.

Go one more slide.

It's slide 14. It's the pergola.

We'll kind of end there because that's been our more, let's see.

Two back, Jacob, two back from there.

I want to save time for questions and I also wanted to invite Dom back.

He definitely kicked us off well, but I wanted you guys to hear a little bit more about the safety team model because it's a pretty developed approach.

where they're coming on site to our hotels and working with us throughout the evening.

And there's training and really a kind of particular way that we go about doing that.

So Dom, do you want to talk a little bit more about who the safety, not who the safety team are, you've already talked about that, but a little bit about the schedule and the model and how we all work together just a little bit more.

Yeah, I'll go ahead and jump in again.

And basically, and excuse my theme music in the background, I'm here getting lunch shoving my face with some food.

I got to do it sooner or later, or else I'll never eat until 11 p.m.

So our team, we have a schedule.

We have a round-the-clock schedule.

We're on call throughout the day for anything that comes up.

We have a 24-hour service to these guys.

We're collaborating with Just Cares 24 hours a day.

We have shifts that rotate throughout different sites.

And we also, from time to time, we've been in the streets with these guys from time to time, which we're going to escalate that.

Like Jesse was saying, we also have a team from Community Passageways building out lead in the streets.

So this collaboration is really deep.

We've been working on, we've been doing, taking everybody through de-escalation training.

and through motivational interviewing training, and through community service trainings, and we've even flown, we actually got an expert in town right now who's in the building behind where I'm at, where I've been in an all-day training with a lot of WDC staff that is in the training, going through a lot of training on how to, on community safety.

When I say that our team is available 24 hours a day, it's incredible to watch how this rotation has been able to serve Just Cares at a level that I didn't even expect to happen because we are in spaces whenever it's needed, day or night, when there has to be some issues resolved, when there's a participant that needs to be dealt with, they can call on us any minute.

And we will be there within 30, 40 minutes of that call and show up and handle the business from a de-escalation perspective and a perspective with empathy and a heart for the community.

I also want to just add in a little bit here to spin off what Jesse was saying.

The relationships that we've been able to build with co-lead staff, with the hotel staff, and with the participant, I think it carries over into more than just the work.

It carries over into actually building a small alliance and a small village and a small place where people feel secure and feel like they can call on us.

They were talking about food.

It was funny, I was in a meeting with my WDC staff and a couple of my guys was like, oh yeah, so-and-so likes this food.

Whenever I go on my shift, I grab them this or I grab them that.

Like, they'll literally bring treats.

to the participants, because they know what the participants like.

And the participants will ask them, hey, are you going to bring me some of such and such tomorrow?

Yeah, I got you, bro.

Yeah, no problem.

It's been incredible.

When I walk into the facilities and I see what my team is doing, It's powerful.

It's powerful.

And in collaboration with Just Cares, this has been an amazing ecosystem of support and love and appreciation for community and community service that I haven't seen or experienced before, you know, besides community passageways.

So my little plug in there.

Oh, good.

If I can add something here, Jacob, could you go maybe four slides up to slide 12?

Yeah, so this was our White Center, our White Center encampment.

Here, like you obviously see the before and after.

I mean, this is what Just Care does, but I didn't want to highlight that.

I wanted to, the complexity of our work is we're dealing with the individuals that are experiencing homelessness and all kinds of other things.

And then you have the business owners here.

And for anybody's sakes, I won't point out the business here.

It was, but the gentleman came out of his business, elated, excited.

He was bringing out his workers out to the front of his business.

And that's, that's what we're doing here.

We're improving everyone's life.

And that's what this does.

It's not just a model that sweeps the camp and then doesn't provide solutions.

We provide a lot.

We're trying to provide long term solutions.

And this business owners would be the ones that are calling the authorities to come down and to remove these people.

And so This is just an example of like just the success we're having with these business owners and meeting with them and collaborating with them and they want to help and they want to provide what funding they can to place people in hotels.

And that's the asset we have for the county, for the city that you work with us so that we can help address the community issues that frankly have been a community issue since Well, for as long as I can remember, I've been a Seattleite my whole life.

It seems like since 2007, everything has grown exponentially, whether it's mental health out on the streets or whether it's people that are experiencing homelessness or folks that are experiencing substance abuse disorder.

So I just would just, again, like the support of the city, of the council, of the county to support this effort and expand it.

I think we have time for questions.

I do want to put out there that, you know, we're three or four agencies strong, but we would love, you know, our partnership with Chief Seattle Club was huge.

We'd like to repartner back up with them.

And, you know, this is also a call to action because we'd love to see more BIPOC-led organizations develop and support their development in this work with us and other organizations that might be doing a different approach that isn't as robust join ranks with us and maybe rethink the way they support some of our unhoused neighbors in the community.

So we're here to share out and learn and iterate and continue to work with Dr. Beckett to examine and talk about and be able to describe what we do.

I'm going to hand it back to Council Member Lewis and I saw that Council Member Strauss had your first question.

Yeah, thank you so much, Jesse.

You know, I just want to take a brief second to kind of follow up on something Ramon said, and then just acknowledge that I'm perhaps uniquely positioned here because my district, District 7, has the balance of the Just Care investment to date.

So I've been doing a lot of work with Just Care in my district.

And I'm not going to say who, but there's a business owner in my district that was completely despondent over the state of chronic homelessness in and around their business, had called the police numerous times.

That intervention hadn't resolved anything.

If they even got a response when police did show up, there was really not much the police could do to solve for the issue.

finally reached out to my office, I was able to put that business owner in touch with Just Care and then got some communication a few days later from that business owner that their issue was resolved and they were elated.

And the person who had been posing an issue for the business was getting the help they need with dignity, with support and compassion.

And they no longer had somebody who would have a mental health episode in front of their patio That was disturbing their customers.

So, I mean, just to your point, Ramon, I totally agree.

I mean, like, this is work where people are problem solving for everybody involved.

And leading with centering people's humanity and dignity and acknowledging that.

When people are removed from the public sphere, they will when when they're displaced they go somewhere.

And that has to be something that we plan for.

It can't be something that we just assume they're going to vanish into the ether and not pose an issue anymore for for the broader community or a risk to themselves.

I just wanted to comment on that, that I similarly have several anecdotes, like the one you shared.

And it's really powerful, especially at this time when we have so many people in the city despondent, because they feel like there's nothing they can do, there's nothing that is happening, and there's no one that wants to help them.

And this model is proving that we can do this.

We can do this.

OK, so with that, I'm going to open it up to questions from my colleagues.

Council Member Strass.

Thank you, Chair Lewis.

And thank you, Dom.

Thank you, Ramon, Jesse, Victor.

You are doing, and Dr. Beckett again as well, you're doing the important work for our city that so many others have not been able to find success with, and you're finding success with this because you're centering people, you're bringing the right resources, and you're focusing on the human aspect of the people who are living outside.

Just for the record, as I've passed requested Just Care model to be utilized in the industrial area of Fremont and in Ballard, at that time, I was reminded that your program didn't even have the money to continue operating this year.

So before I could look to expanding the program, I had to make sure you were whole, just this year for the population of people that you are already working with.

It sounds like we have received good news on that front.

And I kind of bring it back to Dominique's point of Let's expand the program.

What?

And so that my, my question here is what is needed from you or what is needed from us?

What do you need to be successful to expand the program?

I assume you need the money.

You noted that this is a Subaru, not a Cadillac and the Subaru is, you know, when you want to create results, it's not cheap because you're solving for the issue.

And.

By making a down payment that is higher than a lower cost option, you're stopping the fact that you have to come back around because you haven't addressed the root of the crisis.

So I guess I say that is, are you getting your contract signed on time?

Is it just money?

Do you need us to, do you need us to help in other ways?

What do you need from us?

I would love to get you into the Fremont area.

I would love to get you into Ballard.

And I'll likely follow up with a phone call to each of you.

So we don't, so we can continue the conversation.

Yeah, we only have funding until June 30th.

And it's a bit uncertain.

And it sounds like we're going to have to apply to a competitive process with the county to continue to do the work we're currently doing.

And because the COVID-7 council package from the county took an extra week to pass, it sounds like we might get some bridge funding.

But we are very close to a cliff.

And one thing Dom mentioned this, but I also want to put out there, we do pay a slightly higher rate than a lot of community nonprofit behavioral health providers pay because we believe this work should be in the sphere of what cops and first responders make.

Just to sort of speak to the more expensive side of it.

It's not a ton more, but we have to have a viable workforce, especially during this past year during the pandemic and the quality of care.

I invite any of you that would like to come to our hotel, the quality of care.

that our participants get from staff like Ramon and people like Victor and Dom's team is just unparalleled, I think.

And I've worked in the behavioral health system for the past 20 years.

And a lot of that is because people don't have to worry about paying their own rent and their own bills, that they can actually give their full selves.

to the work.

When I moved to Seattle, after I got my master's degree, I made $24,000 a year to work at a local behavioral health organization.

I took a pay cut, and it is just untenable, especially at the rents that we pay now.

So that's another important piece.

But yeah, to speak to the bigger picture around funding, we don't have a very long highway in front of us around that.

Thank you, Justin.

Oh, take it away, Victor.

I'll follow up if I I might have a follow up question, but it sounds great.

Thank you.

I think beyond what Jesse has said, I think, as we already say, timing is really critical here.

Well, we are we are told by the county that we had to go to a very competitive procurement process.

And again, we are talking about lives as at stake here and stability of the clients that we serve.

I would be very, very cautious and worry about dismantling and disrupting a safety net, it's going to cost the system even more if anything does not get continued on time.

I also serve on the City of Seattle Community Accountability Board.

It's a new board that just got changed from Safe and Thriving Committee.

I reference it because I know that through this board that we are being very creative about the funding allocation.

Instead of putting providers through a very onerous process of a procurement or RFP process, I know the city has been thinking creatively about how to utilize APA funding to really support providers, existing providers who had already demonstrated outcomes.

I see this as an opportunity and I urge the city council to be thinking about doing something different out of the traditional pathway.

While I understand the structure that the city needs to go through, but it has been done.

So I just think that it's possible to even provide a one-time only funding to get us over this process and then thinking about how to provide a more long-term funding because again time is the accent here and we are living in a very unusual time during the pandemic even though we are now thriving in phase three but again we will be dismantling a system that is working so if you ask me what we need is quick rapid funding support and then think about long-term funding if we have to go through a competitive process or I would say as a service provider that Again, if something is already working, why recreate the will?

This has already proven to be something that is successful.

And I have always been proud to live in a city of Seattle that we are an innovative thinker, innovative city.

And I think this is also something that I will speak boldly that this just care program can be even replicated nationally.

I think it's totally possible.

One last comment that I will make beyond what Jesse had mentioned.

paying above living wage or more higher wage for the behavioral health providers or WDC staff.

Our work is also supporting the hotel staff, the hotel workers.

And the work had actually helped sustain the hotel workers during this time, who historically have always been below living wage.

But the Just Care program had allowed us to also support our community members who work in the hotel industry.

And this will be two quick story from the hotel workers.

One of them that I work with very closely through the Just Care Program is motivated to resume her program to become a registered nurse.

I was just so inspired by her from wanting to become a registered nurse because of the interaction through the Just Care Program.

A second hotel worker had also asked me to write a letter of recommendation.

to pursue a master degree in counseling.

Our work do not only transform lives of the clients, but we are transforming the hotel industry, which I think is really revolutionary.

And Council Member Suarez, do you have a follow-up on your questions there, or can I go to the next council member?

Yes, just briefly.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you for that additional commentary.

You're spot on.

If you have a model that works, A, don't dismantle it, and B, expand it.

So I guess I just want to focus my question a little bit more.

And Jesse, happy to follow up offline, Dom, happy to follow up.

Same with you, Victor, Ramon.

Are there barriers on funding right now that you see to expand, to scale up your services?

And if you want to follow up offline, happy to do so.

I just kind of wanted to know, are there barriers beyond just the funding?

And what I noticed from what Victor said is you need the financial stability.

That stability aspect is what you're providing other people and yet is not being provided to you.

A barrier is, as we all know, and hopefully many of the folks on this call are vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated.

So tourism is opening back up and.

Some of our hotels that we're working in are no longer interested in collaborating with us and so.

Thankfully, the county has provided us a whole hotel that we have site control over, similar to how the city has done the Executive and the Kings Inn, and we need more of that.

We need more of entire hotels to work in our collaboration with, and we certainly would do that in collaboration with other hotel operators.

It's a big lift to run a hotel, as we're learning.

But because of the safety team and the partnerships that we have, we've been able to pull it off.

But I think that's what's going to be needed is just more beds.

Yeah.

Let me, can I say something real quick, real quick?

Um, it's, it's very hard to do this work and concentrate on this work when you don't know what the future looks like or what the future holds.

When you don't know if you're going to have to shut down and put people back out on the streets, when you don't know if you're going to be able to keep employing these people that are making a good living way.

and able to take care of their families, and all of a sudden that might get cut off in a matter of six months, eight months, or a year.

What needs to happen is it needs to be long-term dedication, long-term stability.

long-term responsibilities from the county and the city to say, let's keep these people housed, let's keep these people getting services, and let's keep these other folks that's doing the work, the heart's work, not the hard work, the hard work along with the hard work, employed at a good level.

They need to be paid decent wages.

So if all this shuts down, all of a sudden, people are gonna be packing up hotel rooms and going back out into the streets in tents.

Can you imagine that?

Can you imagine seeing that?

And then on top of that, not only that will happen, but how many people will become unemployed and have to go out and search for other jobs that won't pay them the kind of pay that they're used to making and keep them established in a lifestyle that they've been able to acquire through this kind of work?

We need to think about this long-term.

This has to be a long-term answer.

Right now, we keep having to put Band-Aids on this thing, and it's stressful to have to keep doing this over and over and over again, fighting for the next six months.

It's been crazy.

I just had to throw that out there.

Yeah, boy, Dom, I can sure speak to that stress too in our efforts of trying to fight to get that money out the door for the work y'all are doing.

So here, I wanna pivot to, I wanna move on now to the next council members that are in the line here.

So I have Council Member Morales and then Council Member Kerbal.

Both of them have been very patient waiting for their questions.

So I'm gonna go to Council Member Morales first.

Thank you.

Well, Dom, I think your last point is the really critical one here, which is that as a community for the last year, we have been talking about a new kind of community safety.

And that means, you know, interventions that don't center the police.

It means addressing people's basic needs like housing and economic security.

And, you know, in the case of some of our homeless neighbors, treatment and access to emergency treatment.

So, you know, one thing that we've heard over and over again is that folks want solutions.

They want something that works well and they want it without police intervention.

And I think this is exactly the kind of model and programming that we should be supporting, not just on a periodic basis, but as part of a new way of thinking about what community safety looks like.

So we know that sweeps don't work.

I think many in the community are realizing that that doesn't work.

This is the kind of model we should be moving toward to provide real services and more permanent services to our neighbors.

My question is, Given that, you know, I think programs like this have shown us that sweeps aren't necessary, how do we continue to communicate that fact to, you know, some in the community who think that that is a solution?

And do we have any data yet?

I know this is a fairly new model, but do we have anything that can help us talk about the, The fact that while this is much more labor intensive, it is also a much more permanent kind of solution or long-term solution to the problems that we're trying to solve.

I think, you know, building relationships with people takes time.

Finding them the kind of services that they need takes time.

And all of that is so much, is worth the time and effort and resource that it takes if it means that we can help people find more permanent stability.

I can try to answer that.

We always say as our reach partners and our entry manager comes in from the street when we do a Just Care approach in encampments and they're covered and lots of things from the street, we always talk about, even though that work is so hard, the real work and the really hard work actually begins when people get to the hotels for the participants and for us.

We can talk about that.

We have, especially Victor, but we have numbers around frequency of contact, how often we need to see people, and what actually happens in terms of interactions with folks, both in terms of sustaining people in housing, so the internal kind of residential support side, and then the case management side.

So this is not your garden variety traditional case management.

This is very robust and very accelerated.

And it's fierce, it is fierce in the time of the pandemic and it is fierce because our people have so many barriers.

They can't walk into a DSHS office, a social security office, a courtroom, emergency room, urgent care, a behavioral health clinic without getting sneered at and looked at and stigmatized and often turned away.

Our folks sometimes take three and four tries just to get access to mental health services, substance use disorder treatment, medication assisted treatment.

I could go on and on about about just that level of advocacy that it takes and that needs to be built into how we talk about the case management, but it is temporary and we do think in six to nine months, if we put in this front end investment is very intensive support this around the clock support the safety team there.

to de-escalate and support folks, we actually think we can help people get access to the permanent housing that exists out there.

And many of our folks, over 20% in COLEAD, have exited the program positively to permanent housing, and that's during the pandemic.

If we had more resources, if we were prioritized for coordinated entry, we could do so much more for folks.

So I don't know if that's a kind of a first step in terms of the question and I don't know if Dr. Beckett wants to add anything just around like ongoing evaluation.

My dream would be to create a very concrete framework of what the Just Care model of care is and then have fidelity to that model because it does take everything we've all learned, the best of behavioral health, the best of like shelter response, the best of substance use disorder treatment, everything wrapped up in a harm reduction person centered trauma informed package.

And so Victor can speak to this really well, too.

It's like clinical meets cultural responsivity and actually just like being a human, being a human and being in it with people.

And a lot of our services are not like that.

They're sterile and they're distant.

You know, it's the medical model that we work with a lot out there.

Even our medical provider for choline is a naturopath.

And there's lots of good reason for that, that we're constantly shown day after day why that's important.

But I don't know.

Catherine, do you want to add anything around model?

And then it looks like Victor might want to, I see him maybe wanting to say something.

I think I'll defer to Victor here.

Sounds good.

I love the Zoom setting that Jesse can pick up my signal.

I would say that we actually, I think data is key to demonstrate success and outcomes.

And I'm all for doing a thorough evaluation.

At early stage, we already thought about it.

And right now, providers, as a service providers, we are using client's outcome research engine through the King County DCHS process.

And what I love about it right now, even in a short period of time, Beyond getting a good sense of the demographics, I was able to work with a county analysis to really figure out the number of services.

What kind of services do we need to provide?

How many hours of case management?

How many hours of mental health?

And whether the person can be linked to primary care and dental care or medication assisted treatment.

To track that success, we even track the number of nights an individual stay at the hotel.

It's too early to tell right now, but we have been collecting this data since November 4th.

But in a short period of time, we already have clients that successfully exit into housing, as I shared earlier, that they have requested to continue to receive services from us.

So I just think that I'm glad that we're using call at this early stage.

It will be something that will be very good to review, I think even in third quarter, to really demonstrate that This is the model of care.

This is what kind of services needs to be provided.

I'm sure some of us are familiar with the wraparound services, but this is much more beyond that.

This is a 24-7 care.

And I go back to what Dom said, the hard work and the hard work that we put in together to really use, provide, and I would even call this a new promising practice that is really culturally responsive, which is why I said earlier that I think this is something that if we do it well, we will do it well.

I think other cities and other states will be very interested to replicate this model of care.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Morales, do you have a follow-up on your line of questioning?

No, I just, I think that, you know, this is exactly the point.

It is this kind of intensive personal, you know, case management and advocacy that is resulting in the kind of systems change and service and results that we're looking for.

That's why it's so important because it is so very different.

Yeah, and it's what it costs.

No one questions when we spend $65,000 a year holding someone in jail, things have costs.

I don't know where that would fall on the car analogy, the $65,000 a year jail model, but I prefer the Subaru 49,000 right here.

Council Member Herbold, your questions.

Thank you.

I want to first start with a statement and then two quick questions.

Even though it's a slightly different model, I want, you know, just like you, Council Member Lewis, you shared your experience with Just Cares.

I want to share my experience with CoLEAD, slightly different model, but still, many of the same elements of the Just Care model and person-centered and collaboration, cross-disciplinary effort and trauma-informed care, working with community members in businesses and in the housed neighbors around an encampment.

you know, at the end of March, myself and Council President Gonzalez started contacting the city around a growing encampment in South Delridge.

And, you know, we kept, you know, sort of checking in with the city efforts around that encampment.

And, you know, we're being patient with the city's work, appreciative that the city was doing weekly garbage pickup, appreciative of the neighbors that some of the business owners were doing things like, at their own expense, buying sharps containers, at their own expense, contracting with a second weekly pickup, again, and providing food, and so appreciative of the patience the community, and again, working to try to be patient with the city because they were sending out contracted outreach workers at this location to engage with folks.

But it wasn't until I heard from the contracted outreach workers that their efforts to place people that they were highly prioritizing according to the city's own criteria for housing within the Executive Pacific.

It wasn't until that point that I realized that regardless of whether or not you're talking about the Just Cares model or the Co-Lead model, this is so much about access to places and not gatekeeping those places for people to go.

And that's when Jesse and I started talking about this location.

And within a week, within a week.

And this is a location that had been growing since the end of February.

And within a week, Jesse and his team were out talking to people, assessing their needs and beginning the placement process.

within hotel spaces.

And so, again, just really so grateful for all of the innovation that's being done in this space in a time of emergency, but really want to uplift.

The model's important, how we engage with people is really important, but really the expense associated with with securing those hotel spaces makes a huge big difference.

And this is an investment that we need to keep making.

So that's my soapbox.

Questions?

The first is really about the kinds of outreach and relationships that this model builds with encampment neighbors, such as businesses or local house residents.

I know a little bit about that from my own experience, but can you just talk a little bit more about the services that are offered to assist businesses and folks who are living in areas, housed in areas around encampments.

And how do people access this or know it's occurring in their community and interact with your work?

I think, you know, the example I gave with South Delridge, I'm the district rep here.

I've been working on that encampment.

And Jesse, you lived in the neighborhood, and so that's how we started working together on that location.

But just for the general public, subject to your capacity and your availability to help people, can you just talk a little bit about how people access the resources that you guys provide?

Yeah, I would say, and Ramon was out there doing this work in the actual field I was cheerleading, but for the two neighborhoods we were approved for in King County, in the city for the CID and Pioneer Square, this is where Just Care is really a build on LEED, and I know that there's You know, community mistrust or community discernment about the law enforcement assisted diversion model.

But I just sort of want to restate something that happened a year ago that we remove the law enforcement gatekeeping and lead us about what it's always been about.

And it's taking care of the people that I showed you on that Venn diagram by any means possible.

If we had to work with cops to get them out of the hands of the legal system to work with them, we did that.

We no longer need to do that because encampments are the new jails.

They are the new punishment for our unhoused neighbors.

And so the approach that we take when we go in, obviously, we already talked about that.

But part of that approach is hearing from the businesses in those two neighborhoods that we were allowed to work in and utilizing the relationships that PDAs had with those businesses and business improvement associations for a long time and really utilizing the relationships that the REACH program through their outreach efforts have built with the BIAs and with the neighborhoods.

Our Just Care Project Manager came to us from the REACH program.

She had worked on the waterfront for a couple years and she knows well the downtown core and she knows well Pioneer Square area.

We worked with the reach outreach worker that was assigned to the CID and we worked with some of the reach staff that were working in the downtown core around the lead model.

So it really took this like community kind of village of outreach workers who have established those relationships with business improvement associations, neighborhood businesses, and community members that dwell there to have like an understanding and an ongoing exchange.

And so Many of our lead project managers at PDA, many of you have heard Tara Moss come in and present from the perspective of the lead program, were part of that communication.

And it really took, for us to provide that backbone function, it took those ties to the businesses and the communities that we had been working in for a long time.

It just is a different type of approach.

It's more encampment focused.

We still utilize the whole approach we have in CoLEAD and the approach that we do in Just Care is the harm reduction approach of taking care of people that was developed in the classic LEAD model.

But times have changed and the world is a different place.

And PDA is the last organization to be left behind when it's time for innovation and to reevaluate.

And that's what we've done around Just Care, and it hasn't been just us.

Most of what you see in Just Care is because of the victors and the doms of the world coming to the table with us and talking about what is needed and what works for people.

So it's relationship-based.

I know we get critical of that, but it is that building of relationships with the people that live and work in those neighborhoods, Council Member Herbold, and then being responsive and updating people.

We had a little snafu, but we're going to go back and update that neighborhood that we worked in in White Center.

We're going to talk more with those businesses.

While Ramon was out there screening people for the encampment, he was also talking to the owner of the businesses that you saw in the picture, and so were our other So it's about taking care of the people that are living on house and it's also about taking care of the people that are trying to live and be in that neighborhood with their businesses or on their walk to the store because they live a block away.

Yeah, I just I was.

I just want folks to understand that you guys are going door-to-door.

You're going door-to-door.

You're introducing yourselves to everybody who has a stake in a community that you're working in.

And that's so incredible.

I just met with representatives from the Pioneer Square Second Avenue Extension Safety and Security Group.

Lisa Nitze and the communication work that you do.

So people can be patient and people can get that confidence that something is actually happening.

It's really, really, really so helpful.

And I could just ask one more question, Chair Lewis, if that's okay.

First, go ahead, Council Member Herbold.

Yeah.

Thank you.

This is a question for Coach Dom.

And it might seem like it's a little bit off topic, but if you'll indulge me, I just want to lift up a quote that was from Interim Chief Diaz from a recent public hola.

And this is more about a critical incident response you're doing.

Um, and I don't want to conflate homelessness with crime, but sometimes crime happens in encampments.

And what Chief Diaz said is that he has support for, um, shifting substantial portions of police officers workloads to new community led programs.

Um, and he does not need officers involved in policing homelessness.

Um, and goes on to say that in order to respond to violence within encampments, The police department would benefit from a stronger network of conflict prevention or intervention teams made up of people who have experienced homelessness.

And then similarly, back in, oh gosh, I think it was probably, it was in the fall of 2020, Bacola wrote another piece.

around the work that you've been doing and your efforts to try to intervene when there was a shooting in Pioneer Square, this issue came up again.

The fact that it's so important to have the community relationships, to engage with the people in their experiences.

And I'm just wondering, Coach Dumb is working on on this project, Just Cares, is it going to sort of, again, in that inter-jurisdictional or interdisciplinary way, help develop the kinds of expertise within the critical incident response work that you're doing also?

Yeah, and I want to answer this question because my first instinct is to always answer from the ground level because we're boots on the ground and we're in the mix so deeply.

But I think I want to answer it from a more systemic level and say, of course, we know that all these factors come into play when it comes down to critical incidents response, right?

All these other factors, homelessness, mental health, along with economic stress and miseducation and healthcare and all these other things, right?

So I think this, what actually what I found out in these short few months that I've been involved with Just Cares, this short few months, I have found out that Literally, we've been able to, because some of the same players that are doing the work for WDC, for my safety team company, are some of the same, are going through the same trainings, coming from the same community, and have experienced some of the same trauma, and have done this outreach work with me.

A critical instance response work with me, right?

And so what we're learning and what we're seeing is it's not one or the other.

It goes hand in hand.

And when I say it goes hand in hand, literally, it was mind blown because we have some incidents that happened in the streets.

in the community, some shootings that happened, and it just so happened that some of the people that were serving in Just Cares and in work we do for WDC had a correlation and a relationship with some of the people that were involved in a couple of these critical incidents responses that we went to.

And we were able to get some information, not just from the SPD side, not just from my OGs on my team, but from the people that are participants that they connected to, that are connected to the people, you know what I mean?

Because that's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a correlation all the way through.

And it's happened a number, a handful of times where I'm just, I'm amazed, but then at the same time, I'm not because we live in a very small community.

And so, you know, you're just only two or three people away from being related to somebody kind of when you're a person of color in this community, because we're so small of a demographic.

But yes, to answer that question, Yes, it correlates.

Yes, there's a combination.

Yes, there's a domino effect.

Yes.

Council Member Hurrell, are those all your questions or do you have it?

It is.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

I have a few questions that I want to get out there.

And then I think we'll be getting pretty close to wrapping up the committee today.

And these are a few, I want to get to sort of some nuts and bolts questions going forward to talk about scalability and talk about how this council might pursue a project of scalability based on where we are, based on the assessment, based on the hard work that's been done.

I think that we're primed to have that conversation.

I think that if we could sort of treat our experience to date almost as a pilot, we're just ready to crank things up here.

So I have a few questions that are related to that.

So the first one, I want to ask a clarifying question of Victor.

Earlier, you were talking about the average of $22,000 per person in system savings.

I just wanted to clarify, is that factored into the 49,000 number?

or is that an additional benefit that we're realizing, right?

Like in crafting the $49,000 per person for the scalability, is the $22,000 in savings in addition to that, or is that how you get to the 49 number?

Just to clarify.

Yeah, no, thank you for the question.

I'm so sorry to be so specific of details.

It's $49,500.

And the $22,600 is actually in addition.

I want to make a disclaimer, which I shared earlier during the presentation, that that was my own analysis about conservative estimated saving.

So it's in addition, because we are again able to reduce hospitalization, urgent care, and incarceration.

And I didn't just create this with no basis.

I had also done behavioral health work for many years.

And it's a common cause analysis when I do, Chee-Wooi Teng?

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s But thank you for that question.

Right.

So in reality, it's not unreasonable to expect that even with the programmatic cost of 49,000, it's driving other systematic caseload changes where the system is saving money considerably in other areas.

And that amount might vary person to person, but on average would be, based on your assessment, about $22,000.

Absolutely.

And the reason I can say that so confidently is because, again, we're talking about 100 percent of individuals with substance use disorder, over 80 percent with mental health issues.

The Just Care program will actually prevent residential, inpatient mental health treatment or residential substance use disorder treatment, because essentially what we are doing is inpatient treatment, but with a different model of care that I just referenced.

I feel really optimistic and confident about the cost effectiveness of this program.

I appreciate that.

So not only is this responsive, but this is also a program that in the long term is going to save money.

So I appreciate you clarifying that.

That's great.

I want to ask another question, and this goes directly to scalability.

How do you vision, maybe this is best for Jesse, but whoever you want to delegate to, how do you vision the scalability with the hoteling component of this.

Do you envision continuing the partnership with all of the rapid acquisition efforts to sort of have a couple buildings that are more permanently associated programmatically with this effort and that are always open, right?

Like a scaled alternative to jail.

Do you envision that or do you envision this being something where we're gonna have to kind of continue to sort of lease spaces Is there a way to use enhanced shelters or maybe some version of a tiny house model for this program as well?

I'd just like some feedback on that, because if we can mix and match, The modes like of where the units are, as long as they're like four walls in the door that locks.

I think that opens up a lot of opportunities to pair the programmatic treatment outreach and services.

And I just want to hear your response to that.

Yeah, and just really quick, a follow up to Victor's comment on the cost savings.

Those cost savings are to other systems, council member, the jail system and the health care system.

But we're in conversations already about the largest health care funding mechanism there is, and that's Medicaid potentially being able to pay for some of these services.

We need the partnership with local government from the spirit of innovation.

But once we have proof of concept, which I think we're close to having, we fully intend to hit up the other services that the city is not responsible for to pay for some of these.

But that leads to your second question, and that's the hoteling or the actually housing part.

We do need the city and county's partnership for that long term.

And so I do imagine what we call site control or having full run of purchased hotels that the county is doing that hopefully the city will entertain doing at the county.

It's called health through housing.

I do imagine that being the primary way that we would be able to support people temporarily, although we're still open to having blocks of rooms at at local hotels that will work with us.

And I do think the colleague model could be easily applied.

The just care model could be easily applied.

to tiny houses, especially if the tiny house had its own hygiene facility and a mechanism.

Having their own bathroom and the privacy and the ability to lock a door are two of the most paramount things.

And so our REACH partner, Nicole Alexander, has research tiny houses and has a lot of excitement and passion for how we might work in tiny houses from a harm reduction and person-centered way and I can even see you know the safety team in there with us in the tiny houses so I'd be excited to explore that option and think about what it meant to be in a tiny house village, how the on-site staffing would look, and how we would work with other providers and other partners to do that work.

So we're in it to understand and explore, and we would certainly want to get proof of concept around that too.

Yeah, that might provide a little bit more scalability flexibility, at least for the short term as we continue to do like the health through housing acquisition of additional units and and rapid acquisition through through state money and other sources and.

because obviously the tiny houses could be scaled up a little more quickly.

But in the long-term, obviously, we want everyone in permanent supportive housing as we build toward that.

That's good to know that there's maybe that flexibility.

The last question, I want people to be very honest with me about this.

I want people to be honest with me about everything, I guess.

But on this, I really want to ask your guys' opinions.

If you could assume, that process and bureaucracy was not an issue.

Like I'm talking purely about logistics, right?

Like, if we wanted to do scalability, and if there was money and commitment from this body to scale this model, give me sort of like a step by step indication of kind of what would need to logistically happen.

And then I think we as policymakers can assist in navigating process policy, intergovernmental conflict, legal issues, like whatever.

I just want you to like help me here at the end of this committee just assume Like if you could just go out there and do it, what are the logistical hurdles that are in your way in terms of acquisition, hiring, personnel, operations, and how would you go about tackling those things?

And then how quickly could you do it, theoretically?

This might be one of those times where I need to sort of huddle with the brain trust here and get back to you.

But I think we would need to go be intentional about neighborhoods we work in.

We want to be mindful about who's living on house in those neighborhoods and make sure we're still prioritizing BIPOC folks.

And we would need to think about the workforce issues.

Obviously, PDA is interested in the spirit of innovation and a demonstration project, but we need more providers like Victor at the table with us to reimagine how they do homelessness and behavioral health services.

And we want to invite new providers in.

There's a lot of great work happening in the city and lots of great ideas, I think, abounding around how to have alternatives to safety.

And so how do we engage with other groups that are organizing and that want to lift up an ability to do this type of work.

I don't know the exact timeline.

I would suggest an intentional roadmap by neighborhood because even when we go into a particular neighborhood, we then have to prioritize sites within that neighborhood with all of the things that we just talked about, the input from the community, the understanding of who's living there, the understanding of the impact on neighbors.

Um, and I do want to go back to 1 thing that you said, council member, and just offer a friendly amendment.

I actually don't fundamentally believe all of our people need permanent supportive housing.

I think about 20% of the overall just care population does, but because I think of.

Because of the 6 to 9 month of robot robust.

stabilization and focus on case management.

I actually think at the end of that time, that six to nine month time, many of the people that may have looked like they needed permanent supportive housing, which is the most expensive model of supportive housing that we have, actually don't.

They just need intensive stability and they can go on to affordable housing that's subsidized, but don't necessarily need that high level of ongoing intensive support and case management.

So I just wanted to sort of course correct that because I don't believe there is a lot of rhetoric out there about how expensive that is and we could never keep up building enough PSH for the level of homelessness that we have and I think the Just Care model helps solve for that because a lot of our folks at the end of their time with us don't need that level of intensive on-site ongoing forever supports.

But in terms of the roadmap to scalability I'd want to come back around maybe we can get invited back and there would be need to be lots more neighborhood assessment in neighborhoods that we don't currently have a presence in and we there's many more brains and brilliance beyond me um that we need to pull in um for that and of course the the folks here on the screen have their their agency and their brain trust so it definitely is going to take a lot more thinking but it certainly can be done and we'd be happy to come back and talk more about it i don't know dom or Victor Ramon, if you want to add anything.

Well, Jesse, can I respond briefly to maybe a few of your points?

First, I actually do.

I want to apologize for making that mention on PSH.

That was mentioned by Dr. Beckett and Ramon and others had commented how people have been moving on to market rate housing or other things earlier in the presentation.

So I'm sorry that I implied everyone would need PSH.

The other thing I just want to get quick clarification on, and then I do want to turn it over to the other panelists for final remarks on this, is it sounds like you're saying like sort of the module for expansion is to sort of go neighborhood by neighborhood, and that's kind of the hub.

So it's sort of like planning, like maybe we would do like a Capitol Hill plan and a Ballard plan and like a Lake City plan, and that's kind of the way you would recommend we design an expansion strategy.

Yeah, I think each neighborhood is unique, getting to know the players in said neighborhood, who's living there.

We know from other experiences, like drug use even varies by neighborhood, and then just figuring out like who's impacted in those neighborhoods, and then how we as a community, as a city, want to prioritize certain neighborhoods using core racial equity values, using values that we all honor and believe in and that drive who we want to take care of, who's most impacted by the criminal legal system, and who's suffering out there.

So yeah, I definitely would want to do some sort of landscape assessment by neighborhood and have input to that.

There is a definite project management and, you know, with communications around that, like Councilmember Herbold talked about, you really have to dig deep and get to know who these folks are and where they're coming from and who's impacting and the nuance of each neighborhood.

And it's not the same.

Wallingford is very, very different than White Center, right?

We would not take the same approach to those two different neighborhoods.

Response is the same.

We still want to bring people inside and take care of them.

So that part is a done deal, but it's learning the front end.

And like I said, the just care approach and we go into encampments.

It's a two to four week process and it's very, very intensive.

So, depending on how many teams and how many resources you have.

That's really where the scalability happens, right?

Who's learned how to do it?

What providers are able to do it?

There's not a ton of outreach providers in the city of Seattle that know that approach and that level of robustness that it takes.

So there's a lot of like sharing out what Victor called this promising practice and inviting others.

And I think there's a few organizations that could do it right off the bat that have done outreach work for a long time.

But I think bringing others into that and having like a shared table, we call it a coalition.

I would want to build out that coalition so more people could join in and have say in what this looks like.

And the neighborhoods that are participating also have a say in what their response looks like, especially the people in those neighborhoods that are most impacted.

Thank you.

All right, well, unless there's any final remarks from our panelists, everyone's been very generous with their time.

I think it's time to wrap in the committee meeting, but I do want to open it up if Victor, Ramon, Dom, if you want to jump in.

All right.

Well, hey, thank you, everybody.

You know, I just want to say, you know, I just want to express my extreme gratitude as someone who represents a district, has a lot of constituents that have really big issues, constituents who are unhoused and constituents who are housed with the current state of our public policy response to homelessness in the city of Seattle.

And I gotta tell you, when someone needs help in Pioneer Square, it's easier for me to refer them to Just Care, to have someone that they can call, and it's greatly appreciated.

And I just wanna finish by saying the goal of our response, and I hear it everywhere that I go, and I hear it from people all over the spectrum, people just want someone they can call to give their neighbors help and assistance.

People want a system that is responsive and that leads to unsiloed problem solving, not people showing up and saying it's someone else's fault or someone else needs to do it, but someone saying, okay, I'm gonna break it down with you right now.

We're gonna figure out how to help with your situation.

And maybe it won't ultimately solve, given the resource sparsity, what your deal is, but a lot of constituents feel like they're being treated with disrespect when their issue is not taken seriously, when people don't respond, and when all they get is, and we have to scale it to the entire city and I'm interested in working with you to make that a reality and I appreciate you spending the afternoon with us.

With that, I don't have any other questions or comments.

And I think that we will just do a call for good of the order or any closing thoughts from Council colleagues.

Seeing none, I appreciate everybody's patience.

And with that, the committee will be adjourned.

Thank you so much.