ChangeLine launches new Diversion Initiative to quickly rehouse people experiencing homelessness
ChangeLine’s large meeting room is full of people sitting at tables watching a speaker’s presentation on three screens mounted to a wall of decorative wooden slats.
Last week, over 45 community members showed up for a whole eight hours, two days in a row, to learn reliable strategies and techniques to better address homelessness in our region.
This training kicks off ChangeLine’s Diversion Initiative. In partnership with the state of Colorado and DOLA, this initiative aims to test, study, and evaluate diversion best practices that will significantly reduce the number of people entering the homelessness response system in the Pikes Peak region. The goal is to fundamentally shift the landscape of homelessness in our community by transforming continuum of care systems, programs, and outcomes.
“Funded with a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, [this initiative] will test whether bypassing the traditional response system and instead using personalized, ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas might work better to more quickly rehouse people who are newly homeless.” - The Gazette
ChangeLine’s large, bright meeting space is full of people at tables watching a presentation.
The Diversion Initiative comes at an especially critical time, as the Wall Street Journal reports the current administration “has moved to give the government legal guardianship over homeless veterans, which could include involuntary or institutional mental health and drug addiction care.”
This move comes on the heels of President Trump’s executive order last summer that enforced an increase in hospitalizations, including involuntary ones, to reduce homelessness and so-called “vagrancy” in the United States.
But critics argue that these involuntary hospitalizations, or civil-commitment programs, “violate civil liberties and stigmatize mental illness.”
Communities like ours know that forced institutionalization does more harm than good. All data points to the housing first model being the best, most effective practice when it comes to addressing homelessness. Just as this model prioritizes housing people before trying to address their other challenges (such as unemployment and substance use), ChangeLine’s Diversion Initiative aims to minimize the time people spend on the street, if any, by reconnecting them with family or friends.
The initiative’s free, in-person training last week was a critical component of our Diversion Learning Framework and was designed to:
Establish a shared understanding of the system-wide diversion approach,
Strengthen housing problem-solving techniques,
Build confidence in practicing diversion strategies, and
Support our collective effort to make measurable reductions in homelessness.
“The approach focuses on those who have just moved from being at-risk of losing their housing to ‘I have nowhere to go tonight,’ said Angela Roberts, transformation manager for Homelessness Initiatives at ChangeLine, formerly known as Community Health Partnership.” - The Gazette
We're immensely grateful to everyone investing their time and effort into this cause—including our amazing Homelessness Initiatives team, which is leading the charge with passion, empathy, and determination. Homelessness can and must be addressed humanely, and as everyone who showed up last week knows, the work can only be done together. We're so glad to be doing it with all of you.