Interesting community support approach......
Walking down a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood–like many other parts of the city–it’s not uncommon to see a homeless person in the throes of a mental health crisis. People passing by often call 911. But an app called Concrn offers an alternative: if you report someone in distress, a trained community member will come offer help instead of the police.
Neil Shah, one of the co-founders of Concrn, which is part of the 2017 class of the tech nonprofit accelerator Fast Forward, describes it as “a community-based crisis reporting app.” “You can submit a crisis report, and our back-end, cloud-based web dispatch platform then rapidly deploys community members that we have trained in compassionate response to de-escalate the crisis, and triage people to crucial services and follow-up care.”
Concrn’s staff includes a core group of seven trained, paid, part-time responders who are community members in the Tenderloin, so the organization can also provide jobs in a low-income neighborhood. It also works with volunteers from a variety of backgrounds; some are social workers, some come from the tech world. To become a responder, each person spends 20 hours studying compassionate response techniques such as empathic listening, using a program adapted from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research. They then spend 80 hours on the street with mentorship from a lead responder.