Housing and Human Services department hopes to create mobile health care unit | Health

Nonprofit leaders in Frederick attended, along with county representatives, business leaders and other community members.

Although many of the services now encompassed by Housing and Human Services have been around in the city for a while, the department itself is relatively new.

About two years ago, the city created the department by combining Frederick Community Action Agency services and a housing program.

The first step for moving the new department forward, said Housing and Human Services Director Ramenta Cottrell, was building a leadership team and staff.

Today, the department’s workforce includes about 70 people, four assistant directors and a medical director. Many members of the leadership team — except Michele Ott, assistant director of the Community Action Agency, who has been with the agency since 1995 — are new to city government.

The department wants to build more partnerships in the Frederick community with business leaders and nonprofits, Cottrell said.

“We’re really focusing upon ‘Are there any gaps that we can fill?’” she said, “whether we’re doing it ourselves, or whether we’re supporting another organization in some way, shape or form to make that happen.”

Though Housing and Human Services expects to keep most of its offices where they are now, it plans to eventually bring a location to the Golden Mile, Cottrell said. Next year, the department hopes to establish a temporary office on the city’s west side while it determines what a permanent center should look like.

The department is in the preliminary planning stages of bringing a mobile health care unit to the Frederick community, said Dr. Carmen Gill Bailey, medical director for Housing and Human Services.

“While we are downtown, and we do think we’re positioned in the right place, we recognize that there are other parts of the city and other communities that we serve that the downtown center perhaps is not reaching,” she said. “That’s incredibly important for our larger efforts around health equity and building a healthier Frederick, a healthier community all around.”

This year, the Housing and Human Services budget is about $14 million, Cottrell said. Of that, about $1.5 million is from the city. The rest is from grants.

As department leaders develop a strategic plan, which they hope to have in place by next year, Cottrell said, they will discuss how to sustain some department programs without grants or taxpayer money.

Following comments from officials, members of the audience asked department leaders questions.

Melissa Muntz, executive director of the Student Homelessness Initiative Partnership of Frederick County, and Ana Mejia, a community liaison for Frederick High School, asked what the department is doing to improve crisis housing resources.

“Unfortunately, many of our organizations are not crisis services,” Muntz said. “We can house a student if we have two weeks to do it. We can’t always house a student that day.”

The department can place people in motels over the weekend as a short-term solution to their housing insecurity, then have case managers follow up on Monday, Ott said.

But, Cottrell added, Housing and Human Services is still determining the best way to find housing quickly for people in crisis.

“We know for a fact we haven’t figured that out. We don’t have an answer to that question,” she said. “Those are the kind of ideas that we need to know over this next year. Where are the gaps that, to Melissa’s point, maybe nobody else is equipped to [close].”

“So, we need those ideas.”