Model and Strategy
No one should be discharged from addiction treatment into homelessness, but that is what happens every day in San Francisco. We want to change this. HealthRIGHT 360 provides residential addiction treatment to over 1,400 San Franciscans each year in therapeutic, home-like settings. With 94% of our clients sleeping on the streets before entering treatment, our goal is that every person completing treatment has a safe, stable, permanent place to call home.
Our proposed HOME project pilots a dedicated approach to coordinating client access to housing. We turn to Battery Powered to fund an agile, creative team of three housing navigators who will partner with each client to understand their goals, needs, and special circumstances, and then guide, support, and cheerlead them through the resource-intensive process of securing housing. Approaches will include coaching about budgeting, applications, good tenant-landlord relations, understanding leases, and credit counseling. Navigators will be deeply knowledgeable about local resources and will advocate for clients so that no one’s recovery, health, or ability to reach their fullest potential is endangered by a return to the streets.
Impact
Immediate Impact:
We are proud to be SF’s largest provider of residential addiction treatment and to provide a continuum of residential and outpatient services to more than 2,000 San Franciscans each year. With the vast majority of our clients entering treatment directly from homelessness, we have become a de facto temporary-housing solution for high-risk, high-need San Franciscans.
Furthermore, our services help our clients stabilize the elements of their lives that caused or contributed to their homelessness. By the time a client leaves HealthRIGHT 360’s residential step-down programs, that person has put a year’s time and effort into establishing recovery and stability. Through the HOME project, housing navigators will work with clients starting on their first day of the residential step-down program, to create a long-term plan that maintains both their recovery and their housing. Ultimately, recovery and housing reinforce and sustain each other: people with housing are better equipped to stay in recovery, and people in recovery are better equipped to stay housed. The impact of housing navigators working with our clients to find safe, stable housing is significant because it offers a coordinated exit from the linked cycles of addiction, unmanaged mental illness, and homelessness for a high-risk sector of the city’s population.
Ripple Effect:
HOME’s potential for secondary impact is also significant. As a pilot program, it will inform and provide valuable data for our goal of implementing this model as a standard feature of our other programs throughout California. We have the potential to leverage the expertise we gain from Battery Powered funding into a wide-reaching, lasting change to the services we provide.
Leadership
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Dr. Vitka Eisen
President & CEO