Every week in Corvallis a group of service providers, police and others sit down together to talk about the people in their community who are in crisis. Together, the group decides on a plan of action and works to help a few individuals with whatever they need, like housing, mental health services or health care. They call these meetings “the Situation Table,” and it’s modeled on a system in use in Canada. Joel Goodwin, captain of the Corvallis Police Force, Dan Easdale, program director at Corvallis Housing First, and Ty Pos, director of contracts and outreach for Community Outreach Inc, join us to explain what the Situation Table is and how it works.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Every week, a group of housing providers, police officers and outreach workers in Corvallis sit down together to talk about specific people in their community who are in crisis. Together, the group decides on a plan of action to try to get these people the help they need, whether it’s housing, mental health, physical healthcare or some other kind of support. The system is called “the Situation Table.” It’s modeled on one in use throughout Canada. I’m joined now by three people who take part in it in Corvallis. Joel Goodwin is a captain in the Corvallis Police Force, Dan Easdale is the program director at Corvallis Housing First, and Ty Pos is the director of contracts and outreach for Community Outreach Inc. Welcome to all three of you.
Ty Pos: Thank you for having us.
Joel Goodwin: Good afternoon.
Dan Easdale: Thank you for having me.
Miller: It’s great to have all three of you. Joel Goodwin, first – how did this program start up in Corvallis?
Goodwin: Well, it started with an advisory group here in Corvallis and Benton County that was put together to come up with some recommendations for city council and county commissioners on how to address the homeless crisis in our community. One of the recommendations was better coordinations with care providers, which was foundationally based on the Chelsea Hub, which is a “Situation Table” in Massachusetts. So we just move forward from there.
Miller: Dan Easdale, when Joel Goodwin says “better coordination,” can you give us a sense for how these various organizations or agencies coordinated in the past?
Easdale: I think Corvallis is a fairly small community, although we think we’re big time. We know each other. I know all of the other agencies, I’ve worked with them before. I would not say that we are siloed. What I would say is we’re super busy. We’re overwhelmed with the need. So we’re trying to meet that need. We don’t often have time to sit down as a group to problem-solve urgent needs particularly.
Miller: It’s interesting. If part of the problem was that you’re super busy, this is seemingly adding another weekly meeting to all of your plates. How is it that another thing you had to do could, in its own way, ease a burden?
Goodwin: That’s a question that we heard from a lot of service providers when we started trying to build support for this idea. And really, what it comes down to is that if we can coordinate better and tailor-make a solution for somebody who’s at acutely elevated risk, that reduces their risk. The long-term is that it reduces the workload for that individual or family for all those providers. So working together makes that difference, we can then start working on other issues rather than seeing the same one over and over again.
Miller: Ty Pos, can you give us an example of the kind of situation that you might talk about in any given week, obviously without giving identifying details about a specific person? How might a conversation about somebody start?
Pos: Yes, thank you for asking. And yeah, I obviously can’t share personal details. But to Dan’s point and also to Captain Goodwin’s, we’re able to get a curated response for a lot of these folks. So when I first started going, I went with a colleague. And it just so happened we had a colleague of mine who had a daughter in crisis, and the daughter was battling substance abuse and in a residential treatment center with nowhere to go. Her daughter did all this work and we’re sitting at the table, like “what do we do?”
And fortunately COI has a long history with working with DHS. We’ve been in the community for 50 years and DHS is a lovely provider. So with my ability to reach out to DHS I could actually get a contracted bed and hold that for the mom. She was reunited with her newborn, out of residential. And she worked our program for about six months, got a lot of life skills. And through that process, she’s now stably housed. And this was a person who was, prior to “Situation Table,” on my radar for two years that we couldn’t even touch because of the siloing, the over workload. But also the pandemic didn’t help. So this gave us an opportunity to have a third dimensional intervention.
I went into it with skepticism. I left it with a ton of heart and a lot of optimism. I started seeing my providers as friends more than just colleagues. It really warmed my heart to the idea that we can help each other out. It’s a really beautiful opportunity.
Miller: Ty, what do you mean when you say that you entered into this with some degree of skepticism? What were your concerns before you actually took part?
Pos: Well, maybe not all providers, but I know a lot of compassion fatigue was happening. We were all overbooked. We all worked through the pandemic, all kind of a little stressed out. Going into it, I kind of thought “oh, this is another meeting.” But as soon as I saw the heart and the people, and I actually had the third dimensional context with everything, the transformation was there. And then seeing all the transformation I get to see on a day to day at COI with all the families we serve, it was beautiful to see all of those resources in the third dimension shared. And just really the heart of it. There’s just such a lovely group of providers who show up every week.
And I now have a better understanding of resources that I didn’t have before. I see how the processes work for each organization. And as a result, we have families that are now getting help that normally wouldn’t get the help they would get.
Miller: So this woman in need – who, as you said at the end, was reunited with her baby – what do you envision was the alternate scenario? If “the Situation Table” hadn’t been in place and all these different organizations or agencies hadn’t gotten together to talk about her individual case, what might have happened instead?
Pos: Oh, I hate to think about that. But unfortunately, I’ve seen that play out too many times. She would have been discharged out of a residential setting into a low barrier setting, where there would have been lots of temptation for substance use. And she wouldn’t have had the ability to practice sobriety in a safe environment like community outreach. DHS wouldn’t have reunified the child because of that. It would have been probably more usage, more hospitalization and more incarceration. And there also would have been foster care for that child. All of that got reduced by simply having this format.
DHS did a lovely job, by the way. I’m just so honored I get to work with them.
Miller: Joel Goodwin, I read in an article about this in the Corvallis Advocate, that for this program, you all use what’s called a four filter approach. What does that mean?
Goodwin: The four filter approach is sort of the basic structure of “the Situation Table.” The first filter actually occurs out in the field, if you were. It could be a police officer, an EMT, somebody who works at a shelter, somebody who does street outreach. And they recognize that a person or a family is at acutely elevated risk. Risk is a scale, as we can all understand. An acutely elevated risk is just like it sounds … it’s at that extreme end where we recognize that if something doesn’t happen to change the course of this person or family, something really bad is gonna happen. So that person in the field shares the information with their agency representative that attends the situation table meetings.
Then at the meeting, we have filter two. The person shares the gender, the age range – 30 to 39, 60 to 69, whatever it may be – a list of over 100 different risk factors that they can select from and just a brief narrative. Not a lot of detail, nothing that anybody can go “oh, I just guessed who that was.” So we protect that person’s identity at that stage. And then the folks sitting at the table from all these different entities will then be asked a series of questions: Do we agree that there’s a risk of harm? Do we agree that the risk will continue if there isn’t an intervention? Do we agree that this crosses several service sectors? And then finally, do we agree that this person is at acutely elevated risk?
Assuming we have that consensus, and sometimes we don’t, we move on to filter three. We share the name, date of birth and last known address or location where the person was staying. And then we pause for a moment to see if other agencies recognize that individual or family. We have a discussion of whether or not there are any other services that are already in place. It’s fairly common for folks to say yes, we are engaged with them, and other folks didn’t know that. So I think that’s a key part of this process. Then, in that filter three, agencies that should be involved in a response are identified.
Then, at the conclusion of the meeting, those agencies get together to plan the response – that’s filter four. They get together, they say “OK, in the next 24 to 48 hours, here’s what we’re gonna do. Here are the services that we can get engaged to tailor-make a solution to help reduce their risk.” They go out, they contact the person or the family. And then the next week, they report back on what sort of progress they’ve made to help close that loop or see if there are other entities that should be involved to try to get them engaged.
We follow that structure, that’s part of the process that helps make sure that we are protecting people’s private information, unless they reach that threshold of acutely elevated risk.
Miller: I’m interested in that point you mentioned, the idea where after you’ve decided as a group that it’s somebody who is at that high enough level of risk to warrant their problems being addressed by this group as a whole, so the personally identifying information is shared. And it’s at that point, you said, where these different organizations or agencies all at the same table may realize that they’ve all been independently working with somebody. But you’re saying that they may not have been aware of that?
Goodwin: Yeah. I’m not gonna say it’s exceedingly common, but it’s definitely not uncommon that when the personal information is revealed and we pause for agency recognition, that somebody says “yeah, they were in treatment six months ago, I thought they were doing fine” or “they came in three months ago to do an assessment, but they never showed up for the follow up.” So being able to have those conversations and get the agencies engaged together to formulate that plan, I think is really powerful towards helping to reduce risk.
Miller: Dan Easdale, sometimes when a whole bunch of folks in some organization or across organizations come together to address some issue, it’s not clear that any one part of those different entities owns the problem. I’m wondering how you address that … how you make sure that there’s some person or group that’s taking the lead to make sure that people and their crises don’t fall through the cracks?
Easdale: At “Situation Table,” we do identify a lead agency that will take the lead. The lead agency oftentimes is the person that has the connection, maybe they just know the person better. But in that filter four, we try to identify other agencies that can provide a service and come together to meet with the person to offer those services. If the person agrees to those services – sometimes they’re not ready – then the agencies can then continue to do what they do. We provide housing, other people provide mental health, there’s other agencies that do all kinds of things. And then they will take the lead there to provide what they can.
We do check in at “Situation Table” for a week or two before we close it out. And then we can always follow up. We have a filter four team set up so you can always check back in if there’s a change. But that’s the process we try to follow so that doesn’t happen.
Miller: Dan, how do you know for yourself that this system is working?
Easdale: Yeah, I was just thinking about that because this week I got a phone call about a person who is struggling, and they’re aging. And one of the first things I thought about is “oh, this would be a perfect opportunity to take this to ‘the Situation Table.’” It is a great collaborative effort. Yes, we still have our challenges here locally and across the state. But just the fact that I thought of that encouraged me that there is plenty of value here. Having all of those partners in the same room, to say “look, this is happening, I’m not clear what to do, it appears this is a situation that there’s a lot of risk,” it’s really powerful for a service provider to have that support.
Miller: Ty, my understanding is that Albany, your neighbor just a little bit to the east, is now embarking on their own version of this after you. But that may be the only other community so far in Oregon to do this. There are many in Canada, as I mentioned at the beginning. What advice would you give to communities who are either doing this now, or thinking about it?
Pos: Oh, wow. I’m not much of an advice giver. But if I had any for my neighbors here, I would probably say just be humble. I think, as we start to serve those in need, we realize that we have a lot more in common than we realize. So I think that’s kind of the beauty of “the Situation Table.” I think just finding that humility and what we do would be my only advice I would want to offer.
Miller: Captain Goodwin, are you an advice giver?
Goodwin: [Laughter] If I have to be.
Miller: Wait, is it just a question of modesty? I’m just curious about why you’re all reticent to be seen as people who would give advice?
Goodwin: Well, I think like Ty said, it’s that humility. This is really a team effort and I don’t think anybody feels like they are obliged to say “I’m the expert.”
But if I were to give advice to a community that is considering this: reach out, learn more about it. Our meeting this Monday, we had some folks from the city of Bend virtually attend to learn more. There are ways you can learn about it, see if it’s a good fit for your community. We of course are happy to help our neighbors over in Albany as they got it up and running and will continue to do so. And if there are other folks that are interested or want to learn more, we’re very excited about the positive difference this is making and we’re happy to share what we know with other communities.
Miller: Joel Goodwin, Dan Easdale and Ty Pos, thanks very much.
Goodwin: Thank you.
Pos: Thank you so much.
Easdale: Thank you.
Miller: Joel Goodwin is the captain of the Corvallis Police Force. Ty Pos is director of contracts and outreach for Community Outreach Inc. And Dan Easdale is the program director at Community Housing First. They’re all some of the people that take part in “the Situation Table” in Corvallis. It’s a collaborative effort to help people who are at acutely elevated risk.
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