New city-county wellness center in Sacramento offers health services, amenities for homeless
City and county officials debuted a new Sacramento resource center Thursday morning geared toward the homeless in the downtown core at 14th and X streets. The Community Outreach Recovery Empowerment program site, or CORE, opens to community members this week.
The center is contracted to serve some 600 people a year, including but not limited to people in need of behavioral health care, said Stanley Williams, manager of the program. The new site was established this year through a homelessness partnership between the city and the county announced in December.
CORE is funded by the county, while city officials secured the site. Hope Cooperative, a local nonprofit, will run the wellness center.
This is the 11th CORE site in the county. Staff in the building will provide walk-in outpatient mental health care as well as coordination with outside services between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. However, the amenities take a broad view of health: Clients can also watch TV, use computers, do laundry, eat breakfast and lunch, and shower.
“It’s utilized as a place to keep people off the streets,” Williams said, “keep them from going to the hospitals and going into clinics; where they could come and hang out and have sober moments if they want, or a place to feel comfortable to rest instead of on the streets. But we welcome everyone.”
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg addressed the crowd after Ryan Quist, the county’s director of Behavioral Health Services, cut a red ribbon with giant scissors.
“There is an ill wind blowing in many parts of our community, our state and our country,” the mayor said. “There are those who believe that if only we could just wish it away, if only we could just move people from unsightly places to I don’t know where — nowhere — that somehow it’s all going to get better. …
“If that’s all we do, then we’re simply going to displace people from one street corner to another. That’s why this CORE Center in the heart of the Broadway corridor is so important.”
On Sept. 20, the city evicted the people in a homeless encampment in Upper Land Park; by this week, The Sacramento Bee reported that the encampment was back, moved from a vacant lot to a nearby sidewalk and street. The city cleared about 25 people from an encampment near X Street and Alhambra Boulevard last week, but offered all of them spaces at Miller Park’s Safe Ground.
Steinberg also praised the cooperative relationship forged between the city and the county, gesturing to the chair of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, who spoke at the event: “Let me also thank Rich Desmond — not your district here,” Steinberg said. “And yet you are here again, representing what true partnership can be.”
County Supervisor Phil Serna, who represents the district in which the center sits, was not in attendance. Serna’s staffer, Monica Lozano, told The Sacramento Bee that the event was accidentally erased from his calendar.
Katie Valenzuela, who represents the neighborhood on City Council, celebrated the relatively fast turnaround time on this new project.
Looking out at the audience, she said, “The problem is hard, but I have to say that the solutions are harder. The solutions are harder. Actually finding the political will to locate a site, to fund the services, to do the actual work of what it’s gonna take to reverse this crisis — I see a lot of nodding heads across Hope Cooperative and county sides — it is so hard.”
The Bee’s Theresa Clift contributed to this story.
