This week's roundup covers a new Omni Institute toolkit for evaluating Co-Response programs, two local crisis intervention training stories out of Warrington and Columbus, fresh RTI research showing alternative responder teams cut arrests without slowing response times, and a look at how New York's SOS homeless outreach program is adapting its NYC playbook for rural communities. Plus a note from sponsor Julota on closing the information gap between responders and care teams.

Running a Co-Response or alternative crisis response program comes with a tricky problem: how do you measure success when every program looks different? Yours has its own goals, its own community, its own constraints, so a generic evaluation checklist just doesn't cut it. That's the gap Omni Institute built this toolkit to close, pulling from ten years of hands-on experience evaluating these programs.

What's inside:

Why it's worth doing: There's no single playbook for evaluating Co-Response programs, which means it's easy for solid work to go unproven. Without clear evidence of impact, programs struggle to keep funding, grow, or get a seat at the policy table. This toolkit gives you a way to show what's actually happening, in numbers and in stories, while also cleaning up your data practices along the way and making the case for why your program deserves to stick around.

Who it's for: Any Co-Response or Alternative Crisis Response program, whether you just launched last month or you've got years of data sitting around that nobody's looked at twice. Partners and stakeholders tracking these programs will find it useful too.

Summary: A Warrington Township police officer completed the 40-hour Crisis Intervention Team program at the Bucks County Police Training Center, gaining de-escalation and behavioral-health skills meant to divert people in crisis away from arrest and toward appropriate services.

Summary: Nearly 100 first responders from Columbus police and fire, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office, and area departments completed advanced crisis intervention training as the city continues to face tens of thousands of mental health-related calls each year.

Sponsored by:

Let’s image a 34 year old army veteran named Marcus.

Marcus calls 911 on the weekend at 2 a.m., agitated and disoriented. The officers who respond don't know he has PTSD. They don't know he's been seeing a VA behavioral health counsellor for six months. They don't even know he stopped taking his medication three days ago.

That information lives in a system they can't access. So Marcus ends up in handcuffs. Then a cell. Then a courtroom.

And his counsellors only find out on Monday morning...

This is what happens when the people trying to help can't talk to each other.

With Julota, Marcus's care team can see what they need to see, when they need to see it. The next time he calls at 2 a.m., the responding officer knows. The co-responder knows. And instead of a cell, Marcus gets a callback from his counsellor by morning.

Same person. Same call. Completely different outcome.

That's one of the abilities Julota gives your program.

RTI's evaluation of Durham's HEART and Greensboro's BHRT programs found that alternative responder teams matched police response times while significantly reducing arrests, citations, and offense reports for mental health and quality-of-life 911 calls.

New York's SOS street outreach program, launched in NYC in 2022 and expanded statewide in 2023, now has 11 teams working outside the five boroughs alongside 20 in the city, including one covering the rural Southern Tier near the Pennsylvania border. Unlike in NYC, where homelessness is often visible, outreach workers in smaller cities and rural towns must actively search for people hiding in places like train tracks and wooded areas, since sleeping outdoors carries more stigma there.

Each SOS team pairs a formerly homeless "peer" with a social worker to provide months of sustained support connecting people to housing, medical care, and jobs. The roughly $39 million annual program has placed 1,826 people in permanent housing statewide, including 58 through the Southern Tier team since it launched in 2024. One success story is a man who, after incarceration and a stint in a shelter, got help from the program finding an apartment and counseling, and is now considering becoming a peer himself.