The purpose of this funding is to continue supporting projects that promote reentry efforts toward public safety measures, crime reduction, and improving the criminal justice system

The County of Dallas will use a $1,000,000 project grant award from the Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Assistance under the Second Chance Act Reentry Initiative (CFDA 16.812) federal grant program to provide housing and supportive services for homeless individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Specifically, the County will partner with local boarding homes to place eight recently incarcerated or justice-involved individuals experiencing homelessness into immediate housing with wrap-around reentry services, including case management, mental health treatment, and substance abuse treatment. The goal is to help these individuals gain self-sufficiency and transition to permanent affordable housing within one year. Funding will support staff hiring, subawards to partner boarding homes, and program costs to complement Dallas County's existing efforts through the Frequent Users System Enhancement project to improve reentry outcomes and public safety in underserved communities.

For years, dallas county has strived to design housing and support wrap-around service programs such as case management, mental health, and substance abuse treatment to help homeless underserved and marginalized criminally justice-involved clients reentry society and become productive citizens in their communities. This project's name is the housing services for homeless criminal justice-involved clients (HSH-CJC) and will be a complement and expansion to the dallas frequent users system enhancement (fuse) project, which is one of the many partnership efforts established by dallas county helping homeless criminally involved clients become self-sufficient and be placed into affordable permanent or permanent supportive housing within a 12-month timeframe. The objective of the HSH-CJC project is that dallas county will partner with local boarding homes to send eight (8) homeless recently jail-released dallas county inmates or dallas county criminal justice-involved clients who either do not meet requirements for the fuse program, need higher levels of care from community treatment partners, or are shelter resistant and would benefit from being housed in a smaller setting with the necessary support wrap-around services into immediate housing, support wrap around services, and connection to permanent housing within a one-year duration of the grant throughout the grant term. There are at least 15 opportunity zones[i] in dallas county, in line with specific priority area "applications that offer enhancements to public safety in qualified opportunity zones" (city of dallas, 2019). Improvements in reentry services including housing, mental health and substance through this proposed project would generate significant public safety benefits in many of these zones and be beneficial to these underserved populations with transitioning back into their communities. Funding will be used to hire staff, provide subgrantee awards to partnering local boarding home(s), and programmatic items to help dallas county homeless criminally justice involved clients gain self-sufficiency and be placed into affordable permanent housing with wrap-around reentry services. Source [i]opportunity zones prospectus 2019 https://WWW.dallasecodev.ORG/546/opportunity-zones