Giving Compass' Take:

• Neil Shah is the co-founder of community crisis app called Concrn which serves as an alternative to calling the police when someone is concerned about a homeless individual primarily in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. 

• Could this alternative method of treating homeless individuals help with the stigma of homelessness and possibly mental illness? 

• Read about a different social enterprise that gives homeless individuals the opportunity to become chefs. 

Walking down a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood–like many other parts of the city–it’s not uncommon to see a homeless person in the throes of a mental health crisis. People passing by often call 911. But an app called Concrn offers an alternative: if you report someone in distress, a trained community member will come offer help instead of the police.

Neil Shah, one of the co-founders of Concrn describes it as “a community-based crisis reporting app.”

“You can submit a crisis report, and our back-end, cloud-based web dispatch platform then rapidly deploys community members that we have trained in compassionate response to de-escalate the crisis, and triage people to crucial services and follow-up care.”

Concrn’s staff includes a core group of seven trained, paid, part-time responders who are community members in the Tenderloin, so the organization can also provide jobs in a low-income neighborhood. It also works with volunteers from a variety of backgrounds; some are social workers, some come from the tech world. To become a responder, each person spends 20 hours studying compassionate response techniques such as empathic listening, using a program adapted from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research. They then spend 80 hours on the street with mentorship from a lead responder.

The nonprofit was created after one of the co-founders, Jacob Savage, was in training as a police officer in Palo Alto. “He realized that responding to mental health crises from a punitive standpoint, from the police, often did not lead to good outcomes,” says Shah.

Read the full article about homeless reporting app by Adele Peters at Fast Company