Grant is enabling nonprofit to provide housing for mentally ill and homeless
Grant enables nonprofit to provide housing for mentally ill and homeless
Former psychiatric technician Ursula Edwards saw mental health patients stable enough to leave hospitals, but they couldn’t be released in the community because they had nowhere to go.
So after working in the field for 14 years, she quit her job at Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute and started her own nonprofit to address the need.
“Get people out of the hospital,” says Edwards. “That’s the ultimate goal and to get them into supportive housing in the community.”
This year Edwards landed a $300,000 Tennessee Department of Mental Health grant to pay for her fourth and fifth houses for people with mental illness.
Edwards got the properties through her nonprofit Quality Lifestyle Service, which provides housing.
Both houses sit side by side on more than an acre of land in the 4700 block of Jersey Pike. They’re on the bus line and within walking distances of several restaurants and stores.
One is for licensed supportive living. It has three bedrooms and two and a half baths that will house six males. It will have a licensed staff person 24 hours a day to monitor residents, provide meals, medicines and make sure residents get to and from the doctor.
The second is a semi-independent living home for residents able to live on their own and come and go as they please. It has three bedrooms and two baths. Each of the three men in the house will have his own bedroom. A staff person visits the facility to make sure residents attend outpatient meetings at the mental health center and that they are compliant with medication, says Edwards.
Resident Gordon Ryan Temple says living in the semi-independent home gives him dignity. He was enrolled at Chattanooga State Community College on a full scholarship when a disease called Behcet’s syndrome caused lesions on his brain. He eventually had a stroke and was bedridden for three years. He appreciates being able to live in the semi-independent housing.
“It makes me feel like I’m worth something.”
— RESIDENT GORDON RYAN TEMPLE (ABOVE)
“It makes me feel like I’m worth something,” he says.
Edwards says a desire to help her developmentally delayed older brother do well in life started her thinking about ways to help people with mental disabilities when she was still a child.
“When I’d see him, I’d wonder what I could do to help him or people like him. So it’s been in me my whole life,” she says.
Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis, homeless and health insurance qualifies to live in the homes, says Edwards.
She gets referrals from Moccasin Bend, Hamilton County Jail, Chattanooga Community Kitchen, Valley Hospital and Mountain View Treatment Center in Jasper, Tenn. Some clients come from as far as Kentucky, she says.
People also can refer themselves.
Space is still available for residents in the homes.
Susan Green, Creating Homes Initiative facilitator, wrote the grant for Edwards to get the homes.
“There’s such a high need for people coming out of hospitals who are homeless and they need a good opportunity to get stabilized in the community,” says Green.
It costs hundreds of dollars a day to stay in a hospital, says Edwards. A group home can provide high-level care with less expense, she says.
Statistics from the Creating Homes Initiative indicate that nearly 40,000 people in Tennessee have mental illness and/or substance-use disorders and lack housing.