Crossover House
John Bajowski
1000 E. Fourth Ave.
Anchorage, Alaska
(907) 258-4512

When Dr. Leonard Abel of Anchorage Community Mental Health Services used federal McKinney grant money to open this program six years ago, it had a simple premise: Set up a "drop-in center" offering homeless people such simple, basic services as showers, a laundry and telephones, and the "psychiatrically disabled" individuals among them, lured in by the services, would volunteer for treatment.

It wasn't quite that simple. "The problem is, mentally-ill homeless people don't say, 'I need help,'" explained John Bajowski, a mental-health professional who came to Alaska's bush country to work with Native people in 1985 and became the director of Crossover House in 1990.

Painstakingly building a workable approach, Crossover House's staff has learned that reaching the psychiatrically disabled requires more effort than simply building a program and assuming that they will come.

Now, six of the program's seven full-time staff spend days and evenings, seven days a week, out on the street among Anchorage's homeless. They go where the people are, whether it's the St. Francis Shelter, Bean's soup kitchen, the city's malls, the jail, the "camps" where Alaska's homeless fashion rough shelters in the snow or under tents of plastic sheeting, and even the cafeteria at Nordstrom's department store, where 25-cent coffee (the cheapest in town) lures folks who admire inexpensive coffee and a warm place to sip it.

It's a slow, painstaking process that may begin as tentatively as simply observing a schizophrenic street person who trusts no one, then gradually moves to casual greetings, conversation, and ultimately an invitation to drop in at Crossover House, which provides its services mornings and afternoons on weekdays in a gritty neighborhood just east of downtown, where the shelter, the soup kitchen and a medical center for Natives also cluster.

"We see treatment as the ultimate goal, but we keep it in perspective," Bajowski said. "We go at their pace. Once they are receptive to receiving treatment, we serve them right here," using the center's staff psychiatrist, clinician and nurse to diagnose each individual, begin treatment, and refer them for any other medical problems that may need attention. "Once somebody gets to the point where he's willing to accept that yeah, they do have an illness, we aren't going to poison them or do anything against their will, then we can start with treatment and get them stabilized."

In addition to treatment and the drop-in center's array of everyday services, Crossover House also provides housing assistance (using money from its Projects Assisting Transition for Homelessness [PATH] grant from the National Institutes of Health's Center for Mental Health Services to provide no-interest loans for rent); and two jobs-development staffers help able and willing clients assistance in finding work.

This conservative approach doesn't pay off in large numbers. Of overt 3,000 individual contacts last fiscal year (and a total of 18,161 entries in the center's logbook, many of them duplicated), just 58 were listed as "successfully engaged into services." But of those 58, nearly 40 percent have been moved into housing; and nearly one-fourth of them have already been "mainstreamed" into Anchorage Community Mental Health Services' system.

And best of all, Bajowski says, he takes home at night the memories of some real success stories: The individual from the St. Francis Shelter who needed 2 1/2 years to get into counseling but who's now resolved his physical and mental health problems and is working; and the individual who was once so ill that he would stand up against the wall of the soup kitchen talking to himself -- and responding -- who is now in treatment and communicating.

Crossover House has a staff of seven and an annual budget of about $500,000, most of it from PATH funds, matching state money and Medicaid. Additionally, the Crossover House has aided in alotting over 7 million dollars in housing grants over the past three years.

Crossover, Bean's Cafe, and the Veterans Administration work in conjunction to help the people of Anchorage through weekly meetings with one another.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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