SPRINGFIELD — The Springfield City Council voted unanimously to approve a $1.3 million three-year grant from the federal Department of Justice to improve access to treatment and recovery services for homeless people with substance use disorders.
The grant, which will run until 2027, is from the DOJ’s Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant and Substance Use Site-Based Program.
According to Springfield Housing Director Gerry McCafferty, the grant will fund a multidisciplinary outreach team at the Police Department to join Behavioral Health Network for street outreach to unsheltered people during evening and night hours.
“The funds will also support a social worker, a civilian staffed at the police department who will be able to do follow-up work with people who are contacted during those outreach deployments,” McCafferty said during the Dec. 9 council meeting.
Additionally, the grant allows a BHN clinician, who McCafferty said will be housed in the Springfield District Court, to be able to offer mental health and substance use services to homeless people coming through the court who have been arrested on minor charges, like trespassing.
McCafferty said the final piece of this grant is a research portion, where the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Public Health will partner with the city to evaluate how effective this work is.
The grant, which is attached to the city’s comprehensive Project 2.0 program that will help attack homelessness, was officially presented at a City Hall press conference on Dec. 3 by Mayor Domenic Sarno, along with city officials and representatives from BHN.
“I deeply appreciate the support from the Department of Justice as we continue to combat the fallouts of the ongoing opioid crisis,” Sarno said of the grant. “We are all coming together to provide a path forward and to try and reach more people, more effectively.”
Police Lt. Brian Elliot told the council at the Dec. 9 meeting that the Police Department already funds 3.6 BHN clinicians through a yearly grant opportunity for anyone in the city, homeless or not, experiencing some type of mental health crisis.
He said the department and the clinicians respond to 300-400 calls a year from people experiencing a crisis, and he added that a grant like the one from the DOJ accentuates this work they are already doing in the department.
“We have a working familiarity with these clinicians,” Elliot said. “This [grant] is to complement that outreach and exploit the relationships we already have.”
McCafferty added that BHN is the designated crisis response for the city, which means there is an existing partnership already available, and is why the city and BHN collaborated on this grant.
She said BHN is a major provider of substance use services and they are able to get to people immediately.
“They have the capacity to be able to transport and immediately put someone into a treatment bed. So those are really the reasons why we came to VHN,” McCafferty said.
The council expressed overwhelming support for this grant and for the city to continue to find other ways to address the homeless and substance use issue throughout the city.
City Councilor Victor Davila called the grant “money well spent” and said that the city needs to address these issues with “compassion and disruption,” while City Councilor Tim Allen commended the city’s housing and Police Departments for working together on these issues.
“Two different agents, two different parts of the city, the police department and the housing department doing a great job working together,” Allen said.
In addition to show support for this grant, some councilors asked the city to also consider looking at other mental health services to partner with on initiatives of houselessness and substance use.
City Councilor Zaida Govan said when she used to work at BHN as a crisis clinician, there were times when the agency was overwhelmed, so she encouraged the city to look at other collaborations in the realm of mental health and substance use to help bolster this work.
“I’m really excited for this grant, which I’m definitely going to be supporting, but in the future, [I] would just like for us to think about increasing our collaboration across the city, not just with one agency,” Govan said.
City Councilors Tracye Whitfield and Maria Perez agreed with Govan’s sentiments, and Perez in particular suggested maybe creating an advisory board that could look at ways in which this grant initiative is working or not working.
Davila agreed with this idea.
“I think that’s something we should continue to explore and look at so that we can build metrics and measure the effectiveness of this,” Davila said.
