Providing Wrap-Around Services and Creating Community

 

There are many compounding benefits to creating a self-sufficient community. Training someone to maintain the property and fix any issues with the houses themselves helps lower community costs and may provide that person with a job outside and inside the community. Grouping people together also facilitates service providers’ access and wrap-around care for higher needs individuals. Moreover, community members can monitor each other for dangerous or self-harming behavior. Communities can also provide empowerment. The community itself can vote on rules of conduct and police members’ conduct accordingly. One tool in particular that ThriveLA plans to utilize within the community is IdeaScale, a collaborative platform designed to share and collaborate on new ideas, evaluate and prioritize the most important ones, and harness the insights and crowd wisdom to develop a sustainable innovation pipeline. This sense of community ownership builds a profound feeling of pride and personal commitment to the community that nurtures the devotion to brotherhood (and sisterhood) that veterans possess.

 

Through this internal approach to community-building, homeless and returning vets can move to the forefront a national movement towards community living and local eating. Concurrently, the skills and knowledge they develop in this community can be taken with them for use in future job opportunities. Below is a representative sample of the types of wrap-around services that will be provided throughout the ThriveLA Communities.