During a typical year, between 900,000 and 1.4 million children experience homelessness with their families
in the United States.
A popular misconception is that the homeless chose their condition – “If they would only get a job, all their
problems would disappear.” It is rarely that easy. Keep in mind that the average age of a homeless person is
7 years old. That’s because so many children are entering shelters with their parents. And, many of these families
show up at shelters because of an unexpected financial setback – a lost job, an extended illness, or an expensive
car repair. Some are there because the primary breadwinner left the family. And half are there because they struggle
with mental illness and a substance abuse problem.
Burrell has operated an outreach program at the local shelter for well over 20 years. There, our outreach
workers provide community support and mental health case management services to this vulnerable population,
offered in the same location that provide families a place to warm up, take a shower, or do a load of laundry.
With a grant funded by SAMHSA, Burrell has been able to expand these services to treat a person’s mental illness
and substance abuse issues simultaneously. National research has shown that this method of treatment was the most
effective way to help a person make a successful transition home – whether “home” is a family they had severed ties
with or a productive working life. Thus, our services expanded to include integrated dual diagnosis treatment,
mental health crisis management, aftercare psychoeducation, culturally sensitive
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“motivational” counseling, supported employment, and life skills education.
Our goal was not to reinforce homelessness, but to deal with it as a state
from which you are leaving – not staying. Thus, the title of the project, Journey Home.
We understood that to be successful we needed to address why some of the families in our community encounter barriers in
having a stable home. We could have an impact on treatment of mental health and substance abuse issues,
and make inroads on critical thinking errors, but if the downward spiral were truly to be stopped, there are many
other areas of a person’s life impacted by homelessness which needed to be addressed. We needed community
partners to reestablish key linkages that had been lost in homelessness – connections with health care, job counseling,
educational help, housing supports, faith organizations, and other supportive services. These critical linkages, when
coupled with intensive counseling services, would provide the best chance for us to help families break out of a pernicious
cycle, moving beyond homelessness into healthy, functional lives. The goals of the Journey Home Project thus became
multi-dimensional, with an understanding that homelessness is a problem with many causal roots, requiring responses on
several different fronts. In this cooperative project involving many community partners, we have successfully served
326 individuals and families in Springfield who have completed the program and successfully transitioned into permanent
housing.