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Project Background:
The Department will fund and develop a sustainability strategy for wrap-around services, including housing support services and community-based peer support, for recipients of complex social service benefits such as housing vouchers and supportive housing services. This will be focused on individuals with serious mental illness and a history of homelessness and repeat hospitalizations and will not include any funding for room and board.
Specifically, the Department will implement a pilot program to provide supportive services, including peer supports, behavioral health services, and supportive housing services, for 500 Health First Colorado members. Participating members will receive housing vouchers from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), which has committed 500 vouchers to the pilot program. This initiative is modeled on the evidence-based social impact bond project in Denver and targets individuals who have serious mental illness and have a history of homelessness and emergency care. The Department has also been awarded a technical assistance program by the National Academy for State Health Policy about how to best integrate services across state agencies to expand housing options to their shared clients who are unhoused.
With the support of the NASHP technical assistance grant, the Department would conduct an analysis of funding mechanisms and payment models and develop recommendations on how to improve support models of care for individuals with extensive history of complex social and behavioral health needs.
For providers, this would create options for them to expand their business models, increasing their solvency and the populations they are able to serve. It would build provider capacity, including housing service providers, and sustainability in rural areas where traditional care models are becoming more difficult to provide due to changing economic and population needs. It also aligns with Colorado’s broader behavioral health safety net initiative in that it expands the network and financing of behavioral health specialty providers.
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Tell us about your work and how you came to be involved with the Wrap-Around Services, including Peer Supports, for Members with Complex Needs project.
CSH has been deeply involved in advancing supportive housing solutions in Colorado since the launch of the Denver Social Impact Bond Initiative (SIB) in 2016. CSH is the project manager for the SIB including a recent expansion project with the City of Denver known as SIPPRA. The SIB project successfully demonstrated the impact that supportive housing had on health outcomes for some of Denver’s most impacted community members and the model has been scaled to serve over 400 individuals in Denver including those with high health care needs. We became involved with HCPF's Wraparound Services Unit when a concept came together in 2021 to scale some aspects of the Denver SIB into a statewide pilot project utilizing funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The pilot, known as the Statewide Supportive Housing Expansion (SWSHE) project, is a partnership between HCPF and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Division of Housing (DOLA), and CSH will be providing Project Management Support.
Can you define Supportive Housing for those who have never heard of it? How is it different from other types of housing?
Supportive housing is affordable housing where supportive service providers actively engage tenants in flexible, voluntary and comprehensive services and work with property and housing management to support tenant stability and ensure that the housing remains a positive community asset for the long-term.
Supportive housing is permanent and tenant-centered. When we say permanent we mean that it is not time limited. As supportive housing is tenant-centered, tenants may choose to move on from supportive housing and service providers help them to do so, but they are never forced to move from supportive housing.
Flexible and voluntary services help tenants access and remain in supportive housing as well as re-connect with family and community, access employment, manage addictions and mental health challenges, and improve their overall health. Supportive housing provides a platform to help tenants thrive.
I am most excited about two aspects of the SWSHE project: first, its potential to provide supportive housing at a much bigger scale than we have been able to achieve thus far in Colorado. And second, the goal of this project (beyond the housing pilot aimed to provide supportive housing to at least 500 individuals) has always been to achieve long-term systems and policy change. My excitement about SWSHE is really about how the pilot will inform HCPF's goals to partner with other agencies to create and implement a long-term supportive housing benefit for people experiencing homelessness. This would make the scale of impact even greater.
What are some examples of the type of assistance you will provide to grantees through your role in this project?
CSH plans to provide direct 1:1 technical assistance to grantees that are providing supportive housing services to SWSHE program participants. Our technical assistance will focus on supporting providers to develop their supportive services teams, model, and budgets as well as supporting grantees to explore what changes their organizations will need to make in order to bill Medicaid for housing supports in the future. CSH will also provide technical advisement and support to both HCPF and DOLA as part of our role as the project manager.
Who inspires you to do this kind of work each day?
Supportive Housing is a powerful platform to advance health and health equity in communities. What inspires me is seeing the impact that housing can have at the individual level and lifting up and centering the voices of those with lived experiences of homelessness as we design and scale current housing efforts in communities.
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