Efforts to assist the unhoused in East Somerville were discussed at the latest meeting of the Public Health and Public Safety Committee. — Photo by Bridget Frawley

By Bridget Frawley

The Somerville City Council discussed efforts being taken to assist the unhoused population in East Somerville during their monthly Public Health and Public Safety Committee meeting on December 11.

Director of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the City of Somerville Karin Carroll shared city-wide initiatives being taken to address the unhoused population through their partnership with the Somerville Homeless Coalition (SHC). The SHC received administrative approval to operate a shower van to assist individuals across the city, specifically East Somerville since it does not have a full-time engagement center. The shower van is projected to be accessible at the beginning of 2024.

A recent request was approved by the Somerville City Council for a new division of community health workers within HHS, including a director and advisory board, to expand outreach services. The HHS department is modeling after other state’s initiatives, including Vermont, to expand their range of services. Vermont utilized a hand-held data referral platform app to collect data on the unhoused population in designated areas.

“The state contracted it very quickly to try to help track the families that were unhoused and the new arrivals, as well as the chronically unhoused,” Carroll said during the meeting. “And to connect all of the range of services, follow up, and provide data directly to the governor’s office.”

The need for accessible services increased following a 2019 hepatitis outbreak in the East Somerville unhoused population. In response, the HHS department is administering vaccinations and planning vaccination efforts through their partnership with Cambridge Health Alliance’s (CHA) outreach healthcare for the homeless.

“We’re thinking about that model as a way for our nursing team, maybe our CHA team, to begin to build relationships through vaccination efforts,” Carroll said. “We want to try to build that rapport and find ways that our team can be enrolled regularly, so when there is something sensitive, like hepatitis outbreak, in this population throughout the state, we’re able to more sensitively have these conversations.” 

Somerville’s HHS department is working in conjunction with neighboring cities like Revere to host warming centers. Last February, there was an emergency pop-up warming center for two days, but Somerville mayor Katjana Ballantyne and the city council approved funding to expand the warming center service to seven days a week. Since the end of last winter, the HHS department worked through the logistics of the expansion to determine a budget, space, and an operator.

To find a nonprofit to operate the warming center, the city of Somerville and Revere is working with the SHC and the Medical Reserve Corps to host an informational forum recruitment event in City Hall on December 21.

“We’re very excited about this partnership with Revere,” Carroll said. “They are struggling with the same issue. We are trying as a community to figure this out together.”

To close communication gaps between Somerville’s HHS department and their partners, Chief of Staff to Ballantyne Nikki Spencer hosts weekly meetings in the mayor’s office to discuss the resources being provided across the city.

“It was this huge learning curve this first couple of weeks around what is everyone doing in this space and how do we all interact with the population and the agencies that serve the population,” Carroll said.

Information gathered from the weekly meetings will be relayed to the council on a monthly basis to streamline communication between the HHS department and decision making on the committee-level.

“We’ll do what we can to fix the front end and the back end,” said Ward 6 City Councilor Lance Davis. “And help those folks as much as we can.”