Federal grant to help homeless

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Oct. 4, 2002 | 9:58 a.m.

A new federal grant will help bring together services to get some homeless people with mental illness and addictions back into society.

The money will pay for a project run by Mojave Adult, Child and Family Services that will combine psychiatric treatment and life skills training with temporary housing and assistance obtaining social services, Michael Howie, executive director, said. The program is expected to help 54 people a year.

Like another, state-funded pilot program announced in September, the grant reaches out to what experts estimate is up to a third of the homeless population.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services will fund the program for a total of $600,000 over the next three years, raising the profile of an issue many advocates have clamored to have looked at for years.

"So many of us (who work with the homeless) have been anxious to see these sorts of programs," said Brian Brooks, public awareness chairman for the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition, an umbrella group of 80 private and public agencies.

"I'd say working with mental illness and addiction has been in our top three goals for at least five years," he said.

Brooks also directs the Nevada Health Centers, which will have its two outreach staff members refer homeless men and women from the streets to Mojave's medical clinic.

The other, similar program to address the two problems, a $500,000 pilot project based more on outreach, is set to begin soon after the state-funded contract is evaluated next week. The federally funded project will start in the coming weeks, Howie said.

Together the two programs will help dozens of homeless men and women who up to now have often turned up in jail or hospital emergency rooms, costing local governments millions of dollars in resources that do little to solve the underlying conditions of mental illness and drug or alcohol abuse, according to a state task force that has studied the issue since 1999.

The data both projects will generate may be as important as the people they plan to serve, Brooks said.

"I think the data they will collect will show the need for more services to deal with this problem," he said.