WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) - For the past two years, city officials have employed a model out of Saskatchewan, Canada, designed to reduce crime and connect the most at-risk residents to services by having social service groups and medical providers join weekly meetings.
The group is called the HUB. Meetings occur Tuesdays at the Regional Emergency Command Center. Led by project manager John Genkos of the city manager’s office, the meetings bring police, fire, and the city’s Quality of Life Task Force to the table with dozens of organizations and agencies.
The HUB systematically discusses and sets a course of action to help troubled people they encounter on the streets.
Previously, this work was done in “silos,” and so the multifaceted approach brings about better and faster results, members of the group say.
As an example of success, Firefighter Kate Harrington said, investigators learned two years ago that a city youth was setting fires. Harrington set out to speak with the family.
“The kids were a little bit more than the parents could handle,” Harrington said, noting that three of the four children have autism. “So, I put up smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in their house, and said, ’Would you be willing to get some more help?”
The mother agreed, and a plan-of-action that included You Inc. and the UMass Memorial Trauma Center connected the family to services and home therapy treatments.
“The kids are great and we really haven’t had any reported fires from the juvenile,” said Harrington, who added that the HUB has also targeted hoarding situations, which present a hazard to both the resident and firefighters if they need to rescue someone from a cluttered home.
Harrington said she gave a presentation about the HUB at a fire chiefs conference in Washington state, and she submitted a paper for Vision 20/20, a global non-profit organization hosted by the Institution of Fire Engineers, which provides strategies for fire loss prevention. The organization selected her paper, and Harrington is slated to speak about it in Nashville, Tennessee Wednesday.
In another case, a 35-year-old homeless man with myriad concerns – he’s battling drug and opiate addictions, has mental health challenges and is a Type 1 diabetic - said he feels as though he “won the championship” as a result of the HUB’s intervention.
The man, Edwin Suarez, substituted his prescription medication with oxycodone mixed with Fentanyl, snorted heroin, and hit rock bottom, weighing 98 pounds. Suarez contacted the Worcester Police Department Crisis Intervention Team, which had previously offered to help him get into a detox facility whenever he was ready.
Suarez was connected immediately with members from the HUB table, completed a detox program at Spectrum Health Systems, and was assisted with attaining his birth certificate so that he could get a state ID for entry into a long-term treatment program. From there he was placed in a halfway house.
“Usually people don’t get that experience, and then they get left on the streets and they relapse again,” said Suarez, who now weighs 155 pounds.
“If it wasn’t for them, I probably wouldn’t be here,” he added. “I’d be in the streets, in jail or dead, you know? They basically saved my life. I’m two-and-a-half months sober.”
Seated nearby, Police Officer Angel Rivera reacted: “The most important part was that you were willing to change.”
Rivera said the HUB is valuable to police in that it wants to divert people with substance use disorders or mental illness from the criminal justice system when they commit lesser offenses such as trespassing, violating open container laws, and minor shoplifting. This allows police to focus on more serious crimes, he said.
Meanwhile, Suarez grew emotional speaking about how his life has changed. He said that he was a thief and wasn’t welcome in his family’s house for parties or holidays. People crossed the street to avoid him, because they knew he wanted something. He said the chase for a high made him forget about his kids.
But prior to the holidays, as he was addressing his addictions, he said, his mother saw a photo of him on social media looking healthy. They connected, he shared that he was in rehab, and she invited him to join the family on Christmas Eve. He said the mother of his 4-year-old daughter is now OK with him seeing the girl.
He’s also volunteering at a homeless shelter at St. John Catholic Church.
“It feels like amazing, amazing amazing,” he said.
The road to recovery has been rife with outside influences. He recounted an instance when he had to call his counselor to come get him because, minutes after leaving a local hospital, his former drug dealer approached him, dangling Percocet pills in his face.
Suarez said he was tempted and grew sweaty, but realized how much progress he had made. He walked away and called his counselor, who he said picked him up within minutes.
The HUB model originated around 2011 in Prince Albert, a city in Saskatchewan. Its founder, a former Prince Albert police officer, travels throughout Canada and the U.S. to promote the HUB.
Genkos, the city project manager, noted that service providers are prohibited from freely sharing private citizens’ details, and so their case has to pass filters that are discussed during meetings.
If the person has an acute elevated risk level, and involves several service sectors, the HUB may discuss the person by name and details of their situation. The case is then matched with the appropriate agencies.
Genkos said police, the quality-of-life team and the state Department of Children & Families bring the most situations to the table, and the top five risk factors last year were basic needs, mental health, physical health, housing, unemployment, poverty and drugs. The threshold for HUB involvement is six or more risk factors, he said.
The number of agencies that have joined the table has grown from 14 last year to 27. A core group of 15 to 20 agencies come every week, Genkos said.
The HUB managed 75 situations in its first year in Worcester, 80 in Year 2, and may get to about 95 this year, Genkos said.
“We don’t want to overwhelm the table with too many situations, because these are high-risk people, and it takes time,” he said.
The average close-out of a case is three to four weeks, while the average age of a person needing services is 30 to 39, which mirrors data on the city’s homeless population, he said.
Amy Ebbeson, clinical director of Worcester Addresses Childhood Trauma, an agency partner, said the HUB is helpful in her work because, in social services, many of the privacy laws are good in spirit but end up being barriers to people working together.
Ebbeson said she also appreciates being able to meet with various disciplines.
“I’m often at tables where it’s just social service providers - Open Sky, the Bridge,” she said.
“It’s a great way to collaborate across systems that don’t talk to each other because they don’t have the forum,” she said.
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