CSH Initiatives and Products: Returning Home Initiative

Congressman Steve Stivers recently met with staff from CSH and Faith Mission, located in Columbus, Ohio to meet first-hand people helped through Returning Home Ohio. This program breaks the cycle of homelessness, recidivism and then return to jail by providing those leaving incarceration with safe, stable homes and supportive services to foster successful community reintegration. Supportive services include employment supports, health care, mental and behavioral health, and ongoing case management to assist tenants in reaching their goals.

During this site visit, Congressman Stivers met one of the participants (pictured on the left), who discussed the importance of stable housing as he seeks to go back to school, find employment, and improve his health.

The stability of supportive housing has helped this participant lay the foundation for a strong life-plan and access the services he needs to ensure successful outcomes.

Congressman Stivers’ interest in Returning Home stems in part from his service on the US House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs.

The Open Society Foundations (OSF) U.S. Programs initiative supports efforts to advance equality, fairness, and justice with a focus on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities and the most significant threats to open society in the United States today. OSF works to further a vibrant democratic society in which all people can meaningfully participate in its civic, economic, and political life and to ensure that the core institutions of civil society are effective and accountable to the public.

Areas of particular emphasis in U.S. Programs’ grant-making and other activities include:

• The advancement of effective and fair criminal justice and drug policies,
• Support of the rights of racial minorities and other vulnerable groups;
• Support of institutions and practices that advance a more informed and engaged public and responsive and effective government.

OSF’s recent contribution of $150,000 to CSH to promote a scaled replication and the sustainability of the FUSE (Frequent Users/Utilizers Systems Engagement) model will help ensure that more people leaving our jails and prisons will have a real chance to become a part of the communities in which they live. Because of the generosity of OSF and others, CSH is able to recreate FUSE in more communities across the country.

FUSE is a CSH signature accomplishment that helps communities identify and engage high utilizers of public systems and place them into supportive housing in order to break the cycle of repeated use of costly crisis services, shelters, and the criminal justice system. In the FUSE model, supportive housing serves to smooth the transition from institution to community, promoting a transformation that serves those released from jails and prisons, and the general population, by improving lives and public safety.

The critical support of OSF and our partners will allow CSH to aggressively pursue our vision to create additional policy and resource tools, such as FUSE, that encourage cross-system collaboration and allow innovative responses to complex social problems.

Returning Home Ohio, a joint project of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and CSH, has received additional press on its positive outcomes reducing recidivism for persons who have a behavioral health disorder and who upon release from state prison are entering supportive housing.

A follow up article published by HUD in Cityscape by the lead evaluator  from the Urban Institute, Jocelyn Fontaine, titled “The Role of Supportive Housing in Successful Re-entry Outcomes for Disabled Prisoners.” Ms. Fontaine provides further evidence that supportive housing is an effective reentry tool.  Read our summary which includes a link to the full article to learn about the findings and implications on the reentry population. This will be most helpful to practitioners and policy makers.

In 2006, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) and CSH collaborated to establish Returning Home Ohio, (RHO)  a supportive housing pilot serving offenders leaving state prison who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and who have a behavioral health disorder. Under CSH oversight, RHO provides rental subsidy and voluntary supportive services through select nonprofit organizations in communities throughout the state of Ohio.  RHO has proved to be a viable and powerful tool in reducing recidivism for persons with behavioral health disorders.  An evaluation of the pilot by the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center found that the program’s impact on the likelihood of reincarceration was reduced by 60% and rearrest was reduced by 40% compared to the control group. A two page summary of the research results is also available for review.

Building upon these positive results, ODRC requested CSH to expand its reach with RHO.  Plans are underway to expand into one additional city and to increase the number of units in the cities currently operating the program.  More expansion will take place in 2015!  ODRC has indicated its interest in diversion using supportive housing.  These expansion efforts will be a positive response to a common issue CSH hears across the state, that lack of housing is the number one issue with the reentry population.

CSH and ODRC also implemented a “moving on” process in Returning Home Ohio.  Supportive housing case managers complete an initial assessment and then periodically asses tenants to evaluate theirs growth and recovery for moving on to housing with either no subsidy or a different subsidy, a higher level of care, or Home for Good. What is Home for Good? An innovative aspect of RHO, Home for Good is a rental assistance program for those tenants who require but are not likely to be eligible for any other rental subsidy.  Resources from ODRC, CSH and the Ohio Housing Finance Agency fund Home for Good.  But that’s not all.  Leveraging that money, a broad stakeholder group supported expansion of Home For Good and successfully obtained a grant from the Ohio Attorney General’s office and Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) to expand Home for Good for two additional populations: those involved in a county level mental health court and those inappropriately placed in nursing homes who continue to live there because of the lack of other housing options.  The expansion for these two additional populations is being piloted in Hamilton County, Cincinnati Ohio.  CSH is grateful for the extraordinary partnership of ODRC, OHFA, the Attorney General’s office, and ODJFS in implementation of reentry supportive housing in Ohio.

Check back to csh.org in early 2014 for a Lessons Learned publication on the moving on project of Returning Home Ohio.  And for more information, please contact Terri Power, Senior Program Manager.

The Ohio Attorney General’s office announced grant awards to projects associated with his Task Force on Criminal Justice and Mental Illness.  The largest of the grant awards, $215,250, was awarded to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to expand the Home For Good rental subsidy to provide permanent supportive housing to persons involved in mental health courts in Ohio. 

CSH’s Ohio Director, Sally Luken, co-chairs the AG’s Subcommittee on Housing with Doug Garver, Executive Director of OHFA.   CSH was instrumental in preparing the grant application to the AG’s office and helping to make the case that supportive housing can reduce recidivism for persons with behavioral health issues who are involved in the criminal justice system.   OHFA is a leader in Ohio in investing in special needs housing and has policy initiatives aimed at helping Ohio assist the most needy with affordable housing opportunities.  “ Doug and I are pleased to have the Attorney General’s office join us, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, and the outstanding members of our Housing Subcommittee, in expanding supportive housing opportunities for persons cycling between homelessness and incarceration. 

The expansion of the Home For Good rental subsidy program will help local mental health courts have improved outcomes for participants,”  said Sally Luken, CSH-OH Director.   For more information about CSH-OH’s reentry supportive housing work click here.  For the AG’s press release on the awards click here.

In 2006, CSH partnered with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) to design a reentry supportive housing pilot, Returning Home Ohio, that provided pre-release coordination and post-release supportive housing to people with a disability who were homeless at the time of arrest and/or at risk of homelessness upon release. An evaluation report released August 15 describes the rigorous evaluation conducted by the Urban Institute to measure rates of rearrest, recidivism and returns to homelessness among Returning Home Ohio participants, and determine the pilot’s cost-effectiveness. The evaluators found that during a one year follow up period:

• Participants were significantly less likely to be rearrested for misdemeanors.
• Participants were significantly less likely to be reincarcerated.
• Very few individuals – in either the treatment or control group – used emergency shelter.
• Participants received more community-based services, particularly mental health and substance abuse services.

“We are incredibly encouraged by the promising results from the evaluation and will use them to identify what additional steps need to be taken in order to continue reducing offender recidivism, thus keeping Ohio’s communities safe,” says ODRC Director Gary Mohr.

For more, read CSH President Deb De Santis’s thoughts about the work in Ohio in her recent Huffington Post blog.

This evaluation of a supportive housing reentry pilot project, “Returning Home-Ohio”, yielded positive outcomes for program participants. The pilot project, developed jointly by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and CSH, was designed for disabled prisoners returning from state prison to five Ohio cities. A process, impact, and cost evaluation employing a quasi-experimental design with multiple data sources found that RHO participants were significantly less likely to be rearrested or reincarcerated within one year of release and significantly more likely to be delivered substance abuse and mental health services, relative to a comparison group.

CSH applauds USICH recent focus on creating alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness.  At CSH, through our Returning Home Initiative, we are working hard with communities across the country to end the cycle of homelessness and incarceration through supportive housing.

In communities like Denver, Bridgeport, Minneapolis, San Diego and many more, our Frequent Users Systems Engagement (FUSE) programs are integrating the policies and resources of the criminal justice, behavioral health and housing systems, and are partnering with providers in the community to reduce the criminalization of homelessness and end homelessness.

CSH is also working at the national and federal levels with the Department of Justice, HUD, USICH, and other stakeholders to promote policies and direct resources to support efforts that end the cycle of homelessness and incarceration.

To learn more, read our report on emerging evidence and lessons learned.

Individuals exiting the criminal justice system with histories of homelessness or chronic health conditions are likely to either cycle back into the system, or end up homeless due to a lack of a comprehensive support system. CSH realized this unfortunate trend and set out to examine how supportive housing could address the issues these individuals faced. We quickly realized that several systems would need to be engaged to address the underlying housing and service needs of people who cycle through homelessness and incarceration.  One element of our multi-pronged effort to bridge diverse systems was to create and convene a National Reentry Advisory Board.

Under the leadership of Martin F. Horn, former Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Correction and Probation and The Honorable Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, Ohio State Supreme Court Justice, the board has helped guide CSH’s reentry supportive housing work and cultivate national partnerships with key stakeholders like the Council of State Governments and educated federal policy makers, including visits to Washington, D.C. with senior-level government staff.

CSH and the Advisory Board brought together a larger audience of national and local leaders, in a national forum on reentry housing in November 2009. The event highlighted the experiences that we have had after several years of developing and refining a reentry model through the Returning Home Initiative in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and enabled over 100 leaders from cities, counties and states across the country, to benefit from our findings and the knowledge of their counterparts in other systems.  For us, the highlight of the forum was our keynote speaker, David Rosa.

David was born and raised in Chicago, IL. After serving close to 25 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections, he had nowhere to go upon completing his sentence. Thanks to a dedicated caseworker, he was connected with St. Leonard’s Ministries, where comprehensive residential, case management, and employment services are available to help people rebuild their lives. At St. Leonard’s David thrive. Today, he is the Administrator for St. Andrew’s Court, a position he has held since 2002. We look forward to expanding our reentry efforts thanks to continuing support from funders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, so that more individuals like David can leave incarceration and thrive in the community.

As part of our Returning Home Initiative, Jeffrey is involved in the FUSE Program at St. Stephen’s in Hennepin County, Minnesota.