Vanessa Williams has been in her new North Minneapolis apartment for about a month now, and life is good.  

“I’ve been home ever since, I’ve been off the streets,” she declares. “I’m just trying to get more comfortable in my living situation.”

Williams, 38, is one of nearly100 people who are former residents of a large homeless encampment in the East Phillips neighborhood.

Before this, she says, she had been without shelter for 18 months.

Now, with the help of Helix Housing and Health Services, a Minnesota for-profit, she and others have indoor spaces to call their own.

“Oh, God, I love it,” Williams says. “Just being out in the cold, it’s a big difference.”

Starting last November, Helix relocated and provided support services for former camp residents.

City officials say the group far exceeded expectations.  

“The contract that we signed with them was for 32 people and they have housed about 94 singles and four children,” notes Heidi Ritchie, the Deputy Commissioner for the Minneapolis Health Department.

Helix says it was able to place that many people by using its extensive housing network made up of landlords willing to rent to individuals, who are each assigned case managers.

The group says it also works closely with the Red Lake Nation, which doesn’t use the same policies as some government agencies.  

Helix says its ‘meet them where they are’ approach – actively seeking those in need of shelter – gets people into housing faster and helping to meet ‘the unique needs of its predominantly Native American target population.’

The program is about more than housing.

“This is a culturally specific, culturally sensitive way of approaching this,” Ritchie explains. “So, there’s elements of healing and spirituality for the native culture. Things like recovery, mental health, jobs, social connectiveness, things like that.”  

The city’s contract with Helix is about $1 million.

Ritchie says about half that is used to find housing for those in need, with the other half providing services like substance use treatment, therapy counseling, and job training skills.  

“We have measures and metrics that we are looking at for Helix, as far as the contract, and they are hitting them,” Ritchie notes. “We feel the outcomes right now are very successful.”

Helix says under the project pilot agreement, personal case managers act as a continuous support system for clients.

“After we get them into housing, it’s actually helping them stabilize and work toward improving their mental health,” says Victoria Swain, a Helix Program Manager. “Once we kind of work on rebuilding some of those skills with people is where we start talking about employment. Let’s start talking about college or maybe getting your GED, things like that.”

Swain – who’s been working with Williams since last November, after meeting her outside an encampment- is one of 15 Helix personnel working in the field, one-on-one with clients.

One idea is to try to keep clients together with a kind of family approach.

Those who were neighbors in an encampment might have apartments near each other.

“For folks living in an encampment, they’ve been going from encampment to encampment with what would be considered their close group of people, or their family,” Ritchie says. “People like their sense of community that they’re able to develop sometimes. So, we want to acknowledge that, and we want to keep that with them.”

Helix co-founder Adam Fairbanks says the $1 million contract acted as start-up funding; enough to keep the case management program going for three months, and the treatment program, about double that.

Although the city’s contract runs through November, Fairbanks says the goal is to keep those programs sustained permanently through Medicaid funding.

For Swain, the work has its own rewards.

“I’m not going to lie, sometimes the work can be defeating, but being able to work with people like Vanessa is actually why I stay in the field,” she says. “To have a safe place for them to be, it feels really good. To be able to walk alongside them and like to see the change happening.”

As for Williams?

She says she’s working on her own health but would also like to get her high school diploma, and perhaps work with young people.

“It’s a nice program,” she smiles. “I’ve been home ever since I’ve been in my own place now, so I love it.”