The highly regarded Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has announced that CTI meets the Congressional Top Tier evidence standard as an effective social program. This standard, identified in recent legislative language, is “well-designed randomized controlled trials [showing] sizeable, sustained effects on important…outcomes.” The Coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works closely with key Executive Branch and Congressional officials to help promote dissemination of the most promising social interventions.
The Center for Social Innovation, Inc., has announced that the next offering of its intensive, instructor-led online course will run between February 6 and March 26th, 2012. Bringing together national CTI experts, a team-based learning approach, and engaging multi-media technology, the course provides agencies with the tools needed to implement CTI in their organization. Download details and contact information here.
SAMHSA’s Center for Mental Health Services has awarded five-year grants to providers in three states to implement CTI as part of its 2010 Mental Health Systems Transformation grant program. Awardees are the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare; the County of Lake, Illinois; and the City of St. Louis (MO) Mental Health Board.
The Center for Social Innovation, in partnership with Center for Urban Community Services and researchers at Columbia University, has received additional funding from NIMH to further develop and test a web-based CTI training and implementation support model for social workers and other staff working with homeless persons. This follows a successful pilot effort carried out last year. Bringing together experts in CTI training and dissemination, adult and team-based learning theories and multi-media technology, this second phase of the project will complete development of the web-based training product and then evaluate it by comparing its effectiveness with a traditional face-to-face approach.
The annual conference of the National Alliance to End Homelessness held in July in Washington, DC featured two workshops on CTI. The first, co-led by Dan Herman of Columbia University & NYS Psychiatric Institute and Laura Morris of Resources for Human Development, Inc. will focused on working with single adults, while the second workshop, focused on homeless families, was led by Judith Samuels of New York University & Nathan Kline Institute. Both sessions were extremely well attended.
Mental health workers and local officials from the Netherlands in met in March with researchers from Columbia University and several provider organizations involved with CTI implementation in NYC. Part of an ongoing collaboration between researchers and providers in the US and the Netherlands, this was the third visit to the city by Dutch providers interested in learning about CTI and other innovative services for homeless persons. A national CTI conference in the Netherlands is tentatively planned for November 2010. A link to the Netherlands CTI website is here. (photo by Eve Vagg)
The Center for Mental Health Services of SAMHSA has released its new RFA for fiscal year 2010 Mental Health Transformation Grants. The program aims “to foster adoption and implementation of permanent transformative changes in how public mental health services are organized, managed and delivered so that they are consumer-driven, recovery-oriented and supported through evidence-based and best practices.” For the first time, this RFA specifically identifies CTI as a key practice that applicants may request support for as part of programs designed to address one of SAMHSA’s current strategic initiatives–increasing the availability of services linked to safe and affordable permanent housing for individuals who are homeless or at risk of homelessness due to mental illness, substance use, HIV/AIDs or long term institutionalization in a nursing home, jail, or other facility. Update, December 20, 2010 Three of the twenty awarded programs (in Idaho, Illinois and Missouri) will employ CTI. Awardees are: the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare; the County of Lake, Illinois; and the City of St. Louis (MO) Mental Health Board.
Jeffrey Olivet and Sam Johnston (both from the Center for Social Innovation) and Dan Herman (Columbia University & New York State Psychiatric Institute) led a panel presentation at the 3rd Annual NIH Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation held in Bethesda on March 15 and 16, 2010. The team described findings from their recently completed pilot study of web-based CTI training for social workers and other staff working in homelessness service settings. This study, a collaborative project carried out with support from NIMH, tested a virtual community of practice approach to supporting providers as they developed needed skills and specific plans to implement CTI in their organizations.
Project Hope, located in Charlotte, North Carolina has begun to implement CTI as part of a new initiative supported by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homelessness Prevention & Rapid Re-Housing Program, a short-term rental assistance program to help prevent and reduce homelessness. The new program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is compatible with CTI in its focus on helping individuals and families stabilize and maintain their housing with time-limited assistance, while developing long-term supportive connections in the community. Project Hope staff received training from the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS). CUCS, a large direct service and training agency focused on applying innovative approaches to meeting the needs of homeless persons, is one of two organizations that provides training in the CTI model.
The highly regarded Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has announced that CTI meets the Congressional Top Tier evidence standard as an effective social program. This standard, identified in recent legislative language, is “well-designed randomized controlled trials [showing] sizeable, sustained effects on important…outcomes.” The Coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works closely with key Executive Branch and Congressional officials to help promote dissemination of the most promising social interventions.
