![]() A co-owner, Rick Yoder, wanted to reopen the restaurant in the summer of 2021, but he told me, “I couldn’t get the windows repaired because the guy said, ‘I’m not going near those tents.’”īetween the fall of 2020 and this past spring, JustCare closed 14 encampments and placed over 400 people in hotels and other lodging. The police would be contacted only as a last resort.Īn early success involved an encampment on a major thoroughfare, Third Avenue, where around two dozen tents were erected directly outside the popular local restaurant Wild Ginger, which had closed under pandemic restrictions. After building trust with local homeless people, the workers would move them into housing without strict abstinence requirements and then help clean up the site. ![]() JustCare staff members, rather than police officers, would respond to urgent calls about encampments. Daugaard and her colleagues created a program now known as JustCare. With federal pandemic funds becoming available and desperate hotel owners newly open to being paid to house nontraditional guests, she said she saw “our chance to show that there is another way.” Īt the height of the pandemic, when the police were ordered not to make minor arrests or referrals to LEAD, Ms. Peer-reviewed research published in 2017 by the University of Washington found a 39 percent reduction in felony charges for participants (a group of over 300 people suspected of low-level drug and sex work activity in downtown Seattle) in LEAD compared with controls and an 89 percent increase in the likelihood of being permanently housed for participants after they started case management. LEAD originated as a collaboration of public defenders, the police and prosecutors, who put aside differences to work on solutions. The program has an overall philosophy of harm reduction, which, in addition to securing shelter, focuses on improving health, rather than mandating abstinence from drugs and other risky behaviors. Instead of re-incarcerating homeless people who typically already have long histories of minor arrests, police departments that participate in LEAD refer them to case management services. She’d already had success in getting officials to cooperate across siloed systems: In 2019, she won a MacArthur “genius” award for helping to create a program originally called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, which has now been replicated in over 80 jurisdictions across the United States.
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