by SARAH THOMACK
St. Joseph Post
While the Urban Mission Project technically doesn’t exist anymore, CARES Act funding is helping agencies in St. Joseph address needs in the community.
The Urban Mission Project was created to address what the Community Health Needs Assessment through Mosaic Life Care found to be the top needs in the community.
Mosaic Chief Government and Community Relations Officer Pat Dillon says the pandemic affected the project and its funding.
“The revenues and things at the hospital completely bottomed out,” Dillon says. “So, with all of the losses due to COVID, we had to roll back a fair amount of our community funding and one of those was the Urban Mission Project, which, we had funded The Shelter and some other partners to do that project.”
While the Urban Mission project dissolved, its mission is still alive through Community Action Partnership (CAP) of Greater St. Joseph, which received CARES Act funding. That funding, along with some financial help from Mosaic, is helping CAP continue to operate an emergency overnight shelter and address other needs of the homeless.
CAP Executive Director Whitney Lanning says they have been operating the shelter for almost two months and continuing to address the original needs of the Urban Mission Project - substance abuse, mental health and access to healthcare for those in poverty.
“During those weekdays, Northwest Health Services is there providing outreach and making connections with their behavioral health services and their dental and medical services and so that’s been going on for about two weeks now and that’s been really successful,” Lanning says. “We also have a close partnership with Family Guidance, so if there is someone that needs additional services, we’re able to access them. But really, just the fact that, as an agency, we’re pretty well connected to the other service providers, our community health workers are down there and are able to get people connected to the services they need, including employment.”
Lanning says measuring the success of a program when it comes to homelessness is about self-sufficiency.
“What we’re really wanting to see is connecting to social services, really using our community health workers to create a support system for them,” Lanning says. “There is an internal community-wide database that we use to kind of track services for the homeless population, so we can see - are they having a lot of run-ins with the police, are they using emergency services at the hospital - those are all types of things you don’t want to see because that’s very taxing for our local economy, but it also is not showing that they are becoming more self-sufficient.”
Lanning says the funding for the emergency shelter will allow them to run it for about 18 months and they are in the process of securing additional funding to sustain it beyond that.
For more information about Community Action Partnership, visit capstjoe.org or find them on Facebook.