What We Do

fREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

• What is LEAD?

  LEAD is not an organization — instead, it’s a replicable strategy that helps communities increase health, equity, and safety.

  Ithaca LEAD is built on the LEAD model, which was first developed in Seattle in 2011 and which is now being replicated in diverse communities across the United States and around the world. To learn more about the LEAD model, click here.

• What problem is LEAD designed to address?

  After decades of an expensive, harmful, racially inequitable, and ineffective war on drugs, it’s clear that we can’t arrest our way out of the problems related to drug use and mental illness. At the same time, the public disorder, crime, and human suffering associated with unmanaged behavioral illness cannot be ignored, and the people suffering with these challenges must not be abandoned.

  LEAD serves people who have disproportionate contact with emergency departments, psychiatric health systems, public shelters, and the criminal legal system. Sometimes dubbed “familiar faces,” these are people who are not effectively reached by whatever safety-net services might be locally available.

  Governed by a collective of local stakeholders, LEAD works to establish a new system of response and care for people whose complex behavioral health needs cannot be served through office-based, appointment-based, time-delimited services. To build both safety and equity, our communities require an intentional response built upon coordinated care, harm reduction, and trust.

  There are several pathways into LEAD: People can be diverted into LEAD at the point of potential arrest, or they can be referred to LEAD by stakeholders in the local community. Regardless of how someone gets referred into LEAD, the real shift happens after diversion. LEAD’s patient, coordinated, street-based, long-term, low-barrier, harm-reduction case management is the heart and soul of LEAD’s approach to transformative care.

• What makes LEAD different?

  LEAD is not a program but a framework for changing outcomes for both systems and individuals.

  Collectively, LEAD works to shift the systems that shape our collective responses to the crime and public disorder that can stem from current approaches to unmanaged behavioral illness.
  Individually, LEAD provides non-punitive, community-based, low-barrier case management and doesn’t require that anyone be in contact with law enforcement or the legal system to get help.

  LEAD differs from many forms of diversion or alternatives to police response. Unlike other diversion models, LEAD doesn’t impose sanctions, isn’t court based, doesn’t require police contact, doesn’t require an immediate cessation of concerning behavior, and works with people as long as they want LEAD’s help.

  Unlike crisis-response efforts, LEAD’s intensive case management isn’t limited to just a single encounter but continues as long as it’s useful. In contrast to specialty courts, LEAD doesn’t demand adherence to mandatory conditions. Consistent with harm reduction principles, LEAD doesn’t require abstinence, and unlike divert-to-treatment approaches, LEAD doesn’t establish treatment as a precondition to other forms of care. LEAD provides an ongoing framework to coordinate with legal system partners who often have other (non-divertible) cases involving an individual LEAD participant, to reduce the chance that the left hand will undo the progress the right hand has labored to achieve.

  And by continuously engaging stakeholders who may traditionally have felt at odds with one another, LEAD shifts systemic policies, practices, and resources to improve both individual and collective well-being.

• How does LEAD operate?

  Ithaca LEAD is developed, governed, and implemented by three groups: the Policy Coordinating Group, Operational Work Group, and Community Leadership Team. Each of these groups is charged with specific responsibilities that contribute to the collective effort to address complex community problems, identify opportunities for improvement, and respond effectively.

  Policy Coordinating Group (PCG)
  The Policy Coordinating Group serves as the policy-making and stewardship body for LEAD. The PCG is composed of senior members of multiple organizations – community-based service providers, criminal legal agencies, health agencies, elected officials – who are authorized to make decisions on behalf of their offices. Together, they develop the vision and goals for LEAD, make policy-level decisions for the initiative and within their respective agencies, and ensure that resources are dedicated for the success of the initiative. In addition, the PCG establishes and ensures plans for evaluation, communications, growth, and sustainability.

  Operational Work Group (OWG)
  The Operational Work Group provides a common table for day-to-day line staff who coordinate daily activities and collectively monitor, identify, discuss, and address operational, administrative, and client-specific issues. Using this ongoing inquiry, the OWG develops protocols to ensure that the operations reflect and are consistent with policies established by the PCG. In some cases, robust communications platforms supplement or may even supplant the need for an OWG.

  Community Leadership Team (CLT)
  Quite often, systems-led initiatives are developed and decided behind closed doors, and community engagement becomes little more than a box to be checked. With LEAD, it is imperative that the community hold a meaningful role in its planning, launch, and ongoing operations. To this end, many LEAD sites establish a CLT to advance communication with and connection to the project’s larger community of stakeholders. In cases where LEAD is managed by community leaders, it may prove unnecessary to establish a CLT.

  Project Manager
  A dedicated Project Manager coordinates the work of the three bodies while managing all aspects of the initiative’s day-to-day activities. A trusted partner of all stakeholders, the Project Manager works to identify and address problems and opportunities, shepherds strategic development, and constantly fosters fidelity to the model.