Boulder receives federal grants for homelessness, behavioral health projects

Jan. 25—Boulder and its partners in the county received three federal grants meant to address homelessness and behavioral health.

The first is a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice that the Boulder Police Department intends to use to create a coordinated response related to encampments and people experiencing homelessness.

The project will include three phases: inventory and data collection; citywide data integration and an analysis of sample encampments; and the creation of customized responses for these encampments.

"This information will help us develop more effective and holistic responses," Police Chief Maris Herold said in a news release.

The funding for this comes almost a year after the City Council in spring 2021 approved almost $3 million for efforts to address encampments of people experiencing homelessness, including an internal team to clear encampments; additional police; urban park rangers and a downtown ambassadors program.

An additional $150,000 grant from the Department of Justice will go toward enhancing the city's Crisis Intervention Response Team, commonly known as CIRT.

This is a collaboration between the Boulder Police Department and the city's Housing and Human Services department and it sends licensed clinicians on calls involving a behavioral health crisis.

The grant will be used to increase the number of patrol officers who receive crisis intervention training as well as the amount of time officers ride with CIRT clinicians, according to Human Services Policy Manager Wendy Schwartz. The funding also will be used to provide a formal evaluation of the CIRT, which formally began about a year ago in February 2021.

Though this does not directly relate to homelessness, an initial CIRT report indicates about one in four of the team's encounters in its first six months involved a person experiencing homelessness.

The final, most significant grant is a $900,000 one from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The three-year grant was awarded to the Boulder County Community Services Department and will help start a program called "Project Recovery."

This program will address the interface between addiction and homelessness and will include treatment and recovery services, recovery housing, peer recovery support and pre- and post-booking treatment alternatives to incarceration, according to the news release.

While the grant was awarded to the county, Boulder plans to work with the county, including assisting in the location and funding the acquisition of a home for rehabilitation.