I had a long history of subtance abuse, incarceration, and instability. I went to Old Pueblo Community Services (OPCS) after my second incarceration in the Arizona Department of Corrections. I was immediately given food, clothing, and shelter. Once I obtained employment, I was given a voucher to go get any clothing items that I needed from Wal-Mart. Once I completed the program, OPCS rented an apartment for me so that I could re-unify with my two children, and they continued to pay for the apartment for six months while I fixed my credit. A few years later, I went back to OPCS and was able to purchase a home with the assistance of the $22,500 that they put as a down payment. This is the non-profit that others should strive to mimic.
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- EIN 86-0836556
- info@helptucson.org
- (520) 546-0122
- 2323 S. Park Ave Tucson AZ 85713 USA
- www.helptucson.org
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Nonprofit Overview
Causes: Community Foundations, Homeless & Housing, Housing Development, Construction & Management, Human Services, Mental Health, Philanthropy, Residential Care & Adult Day Programs, Substance Abuse Treatment
Mission: When people face homelessness, old pueblo community services offers housing, counseling and support services to help them transform their lives.
Programs: Reentry & veteran communities - we have adopted the "housing first" model across all of our programs. This allows opcs to help homeless individuals find housing while providing treatment services for substance abuse issues. Our clients consist of both seriously mentally ill (smi) and general mental health and substance abuse (gmhsa) disorders. Opcs now offers the entire continuum of housing models which include; bridge, shelter, transitional and permanent housing as well as substance abuse counseling and life skills for both veteran and non-veteran clients. In 2017, we served 1,627 clients, of which 1,247 were male and 374 were female and 3 were transgender. Of these clients, 1,594 (98%) had some type of disability. We continue to have 8 veteran programs which include 125 transitional housing beds. We treated 476 veterans during 2017. We also served 27 households with children in our permanent families housing program.
supportive housing - we have grant funding for 130 units of permanent supportive housing. Clients are screened to determine those with the highest level of need. These are the clients that are housed first. There is very little attrition in this program, so there were approximately 145 clients served through our supportive housing department for 2017. We also work closely with the tucson mayor, jonathan rothschild, to assess and provide permanent housing and services to our homeless veterans. All clients have access to support services through opcs, as well as the community at large. Within both of these departments listed above, we provide behavioral health services, utilizing cenpatico integrated care, which is federal medicaid funding at our local level. This has become a significant part of the revenue, which has replaced previous federal grant funding.
housing development - effective mid-2017 we have ceased this department which previously built or rehabilitated low income housing. This decision was made simultaneously with the recent change in the mission statement. We felt that this department was outside our core mission. We completed the rehabilitation and sold the last three homes during the first half of 2017.