Introduction to CSH's FUSE Model

Communities spend billions of dollars on services that bounce vulnerable people between shelters, hospitals, jails, treatment programs, foster care and the streets. CSH's FUSE model works to solve this problem.

FUSE helps communities to break the cycle of homelessness and crisis among individuals with complex behavioral health challenges who are the highest users of emergency rooms, jails, shelters, clinics and other costly crisis service systems.

FUSE increases housing stability and reduces multiple crisis service use--which means more effective use of public funds.

While CSH has helped each of the communities implementing FUSE to adapt to the model to suit its unique local contexts and conditions, at the core of FUSE are three essential pillars:

• Data-Driven Problem-Solving: Data is used to identify a specific target population of high-cost, high-need individuals who are shared clients of multiple systems (jails, homeless shelters and crisis health services) and whose persistent cycling indicates the failure of traditional approaches. Data is also used to develop a new shared definition of success that takes into account both human and public costs, and where the focus is on avoiding institutions altogether, as opposed to simply offloading clients from one system to another.

• Policy and Systems Reform: Public systems and policymakers are engaged in a collective effort to address the needs of shared clients and to shift resources away from costly crisis services and towards a more cost-effective and humane solution: permanent housing and supportive services.

• Targeted Housing and Services: Supportive housing—permanent housing linked to individualized supportive services—is enhanced with targeted and assertive recruitment through in-reach into jails, shelters, hospitals and other settings, in order to help clients obtain housing stability and avoid returns to costly crisis services and institutions.

CSH is replicating the FUSE model in communities across the country including Detroit and Rhode Island. Find out how we can bring FUSE to where you live.

See examples of CSH's local systems change work.