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Local Project Offers A Housing Solution For The Formerly Incarcerated

Melorie Begay/KLCC News
Paul Solomon stands in front of the Oaks at 14th apartment complex. The complex offers both housing and support for people recently released from jail or prison.

A Lane County partnership has developed a new framework for reducing recidivism. If all goes well, that plan could become a national model.

In 2016 the federal government awarded Sponsors, Homes for Good and Lane County Parole and Probation $1.3 million to design a project that addresses homeless people with criminal pasts.

Together they came up with what’s called “The Way Home.” It’s a plan that will create housing for over a hundred people.

Paul Solomon, the executive director of Sponsors, said the idea is to track the outcome of participants. “I think what we’ll find is one, we’ll have a great data set for researchers to work with,” he said. 

All the collected data will be given to both the University of Oregon and New York University. The institutions will evaluate the data and determine how well Sponsors is doing.

“We’ll also have some solid evidence around the effectiveness of what we’ve been doing for years,” Solomon said.

The Sponsors program will only receive continued funding, Solomon said, if data shows they’ve helped people avoid jail or prison. If so, other organizations around the country could adopt similar practices.

Melorie Begay is a multimedia journalist for KLCC News. She was the Inaugural KLCC Public Radio Foundation Journalism Fellow. She has a bachelors in Multimedia Journalism from the University of New Mexico. She previously interned at KUNM public radio in Albuquerque, NM and served as a fellow for the online news publication New Mexico In Depth.
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