Enhancing Community Integration for Homeless Veterans

NIH RePORTER · VA · I50 · · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

Homelessness in Veterans is a widespread, vexing problem, and a priority at the national level. Despite substantial progress in providing housing for Veterans, a fundamental problem remains: Permanent housing is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for successful community integration. Community integration includes: 1) social integration (i.e., contact with family and friends) and 2) work outcome (maintaining productive activities in work or school). Providing housing is only the first step in facilitating recovery among homeless Veterans; once housed, they need different types of assistance to integrate into communities. For these reasons we established a REAP at GLA. Its mission is to understand and to improve community integration in homeless and recently-housed Veterans. The REAP mission has been enacted by establishing an interdisciplinary community of researchers, educators, and clinicians to generate intervention and translational research to improve community integration for these Veterans. The translational research involves the application of cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience approaches to better understand community integration and to guide treatment development. This REAP fills a critical gap -- rather than focusing on factors that confer risk for homelessness in Veterans, this team of investigators applies their skills to the neglected problem of community integration for homeless and recently-housed Veterans. The REAP also attracts and develops clinical researchers and trainees who focus on this critical problem. It is fitting that this REAP is based at GLA, which has the largest homeless program of any VA in the nation, serving 7,449 homeless Veterans in FY18. The REAP mission consists of several components: Research: This REAP supports translational studies to understand the nature of work and social community integration in homeless Veterans, and also intervention studies to rigorously evaluate innovative treatments to enhance community integration for these individuals. Training: This REAP encourages postdoctoral fellows and early career investigators to focus their professional talents on the topic of homelessness and community integration in Veterans. This goal is reflected in the Pilot Grant program and through multi-disciplinary mentorship. Facilitation: The proposed REAP provides support for independent grant submissions. Applications benefit from the infrastructure, such as recruitment pathways, and a rare collection of expertise in clinical trial methodology, outcomes research, and cognitive and social neuroscience. Activities in the next phase of the REAP are guided by key findings from the first phase. In phase 1 of the REAP, we conducted two independent prospective studies. Both studies found essentially no change in community integration (family, social, and work) over 12 months in GLA homeless programs. This lack of change occurred at the group level; it is clear that provision of housing is ben...

Key facts

NIH application ID
9821724
Project number
2I50RX001875-06
Recipient
VA GREATER LOS ANGELES HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Principal Investigator
Michael F. Green
Activity code
I50
Funding institute
VA
Fiscal year
2020
Award amount
Award type
2
Project period
2015-05-01 → 2020-09-30