Miami Safe STREETS Collaborative - The Miami Safe Streets Collaborative (MSSC) will implement a coordinated, multidisciplinary street-based behavioral health and housing engagement initiative serving the City of Miami, Florida. The project targets unsheltered adults experiencing serious mental illness (SMI), substance use disorders (SUD), and co-occurring disorders who are disconnected from traditional services. The project will serve 1,200 unduplicated participants across four years. MSSC will focus on high-need areas including Downtown Miami, Overtown, Little Havana, Allapattah, and the Wynwood/Edgewater corridor, where unsheltered individuals are most likely to be encountered and connected to care. The target population is primarily adults ages 25 to 54, with active outreach to women, transitional-age youth ages 18 to 24, and older adults 55 and older. Participants often experience severe mental illness, substance use disorders, co-occurring disorders, homelessness, trauma, chronic medical conditions, overdose risk, and barriers to treatment, benefits, and housing. Using Assertive Community Treatment-informed mobile teams, Motivational Interviewing, Critical Time Intervention, Trauma-Informed Care, peer support, overdose prevention, medication-assisted treatment, psychiatric care, and coordinated case management, MSSC will engage individuals where they reside and rapidly connect them to crisis stabilization, treatment, transitional housing, permanent housing, and recovery supports. Partnerships with behavioral health providers, hospitals, law enforcement, courts, and housing providers will create an integrated continuum of care. MSSC will reduce overdose risk, improve access to behavioral health treatment, strengthen recovery, increase housing stability, and decrease unnecessary emergency and justice-system involvement for unsheltered individuals in Miami-Dade County. Over the grant period, the project will conduct 200 overdose prevention encounters annually, screen 300 unsheltered individuals each year, connect at least 120 participants to crisis services, initiate treatment for 150 individuals, support 100 participants through treatment and housing pathways, and complete quarterly hotspot analyses to guide outreach.
