$500,000 grant will fund new program to address homelessness in Petaluma

A new initiative by Petaluma’s Committee on the Shelterless to address chronic homelessness in the southern portion of the county is set to begin this fall, thanks to a $500,000 grant from Providence St. Joseph Health.

The funds will go toward creation of an 18-month pilot program that will deploy a “coordinated care team” to rapidly address new clients and get them stabilized so they can be housed as quickly as possible.

COTS’ program is one of two Sonoma County proposals, and just nine statewide, to receive funding from the pool of $10 million dispersed in California by Providence St. Joseph Health.

An additional $300,000 was awarded to round out the county Department of Health’s Whole Person Care Strategy, a new effort aiming to better address the needs of MediCal patients who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and have a serious mental illness. Specifically, the funding will go toward improvements to the data management system to allow better communication about clients between the county and local health systems.

The funds are being administered by the health system’s Well Being Trust, formed when Providence St. Joseph Health made a $100 million commitment to improve mental health care across the nation. By 2019, the trust will distribute a total of $30 million to projects across the state dedicated to such aims.

The Petaluma program, dubbed the “Coordinated Health, Wellness and Housing Initiative,” has a lofty goal: Increase the number of people housed through COTS by a full 10 percent for this fiscal year, compared with a year-ago success rate of 33 percent.

The program hopes to serve nearly 1,000 homeless and is the latest attempt in the county at a housing-first strategy to address homelessness. The idea is the sooner people are housed, the more dramatically their environment changes and the better the chance for success.

“Once they’re housed, a lot of the impacts on society disappear,” said Mike Johnson, CEO of COTS. “They’re not out getting hurt. They’re not out drinking in the streets. … And it’s so much better for them. Having a roof over your head is much healthier than not.”

The model being used across the country is to deploy a multidisciplinary team to support homeless people from all angles - finances, housing, health - with each member in a specific role. The Providence St. Joseph Health grant will allow COTS to hire four additional staffers: a project manager, clinical care coordinator, an income development specialist to help those on the employment track and a housing navigator, someone connected to Sonoma County’s competitive rental market.

“When you have a less than 1 percent vacancy rate, it’s really not about finding vacant units anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s about developing a relationship.”

COTS’ current intake strategy means intake and assessment wait times can take be as long as 14 days. With the new coordinated care team, the goal will be to reduce that time to two days.

Since the 2014-2015 fiscal year, total government funding has declined by 22 percent, Johnson said, amounting to a loss of $289,604, making the Providence St. Joseph Health grant “kind of a dream come true.”

He hopes this grant, and the additional staffing, will create a more organized approach to care.

“We just had the case managers, basically, and they were trying to coordinate all these complex mental health services at the same time that they were doing their regular job,” Johnson said.

Hospitals across the Providence St. Joseph Health system were invited to tell their community partners about the grant opportunity, and COTS immediately came to mind, said Dan Schurman, community partnership manager for the Sonoma County system of Providence St. Joseph Health.

“I think the COTS track record of success is really impressive,” he said. “So we know that they’re doing something right to begin with.”

About 10 percent of the county’s 2,835 homeless live in Petaluma, a number that’s declined from 361 homeless in 2015 to 283 in 2017, according to the Sonoma County Homeless Census.

The shift in how care is approached, Johnson said, will hopefully drop that number more.

“I’ve been concerned for a long time about how we can do a better job for the folks that we’re losing to death, to the streets,” Johnson said.

“We’ve just not done a great job with these folks over the years, and to have an opportunity to meet their needs in such a comprehensive way - it’s tremendous. It gives me hope for the future.”