The city of Jackson needs about $7 million in additional funds to implement a two-year pilot program that has proven success at moving people living on the street into housing.
The city already has $3 million from the HOME Investment Partnerships American Rescue Plan Program (Home-ARP) that can be used for the program that would cost $9.7 million, said Angela Brown, director of planning and development for the city of Jackson.
The goal is for public and private sector funding to pay for the program, she said, noting that businesses, faith-based groups, foundations and other organizations could help pay for it.
Brown would like for Houston, Texas-based Clutch Consulting Group to guide the city in what’s known as a Direct to Housing Encampment Response program and have it operational by the end of the year. “We’re trying to move as fast as we can,” she said.
Jackson Mayor John Horhn has not yet signed a contract with Clutch Consulting but will need to do so. The Jackson City Council will have to approve it.
Kevin Parkinson, who represents Ward 7 on the city council, said he would vote in favor of the city contracting with Clutch Consulting and encourage fellow council members to do so.
“Our current approach to homelessness is either to criminalize it and push people away but that’s not effective or to just let the homeless do what they want,” he said. “Clutch uses a method to unite support services for the homeless in a fresh new way and would benefit the entire city.”
Clutch Consulting has worked with city leaders in more than a dozen locations to provide strategic planning, analyze data about homelessness and come up with a plan and put a team in place to move individuals from the streets and encampments to housing.
“We introduce new ways of doing business,” said Mandy Chapman Semple, principal at Clutch Consulting who spent almost three days in Jackson last month.
“The goal is to help the community transform the way it responds to homelessness.”
A multi-disciplinary team, with guidance from Clutch, gathers at an encampment for an intervention, the goal of which is to quickly move individuals who want help to housing that has been lined up before the intervention. The encampment is then shut down, has signs noting it is closed and monitored to ensure no one lives there after it is closed.
“One of the things that everyone believes is that when you see individuals sleeping outside, they don’t want to be in housing,” Semple said. “The funny thing is, they do. When you say, ‘We have housing, we want to help you stabilize in a safe environment,’ overwhelmingly people say, ‘Yes.”’
Clutch Consulting’s experience with interventions has shown that there are usually a handful of individuals at one who don’t want help.
“They’re in crisis and should be in the hospital,” she said. They’re not in a position to make decisions for themselves. They’ve fallen through the cracks of the system.”
A complex case team, which includes behavioral health experts, law enforcement and hospitals, works with those individuals so that there’s a pathway to institutional care and discharge to appropriate long-term care, she said.
Systematically closing encampment after encampment sets a new tone and new expectations, Semple said. “It’s about redirection and equipping shelters to be the place of resolution,” she said.
Clutch Consulting visited Jackson in March at the invitation of Downtown Jackson Partners, which paid the consulting firm to assess the city’s unhoused population.
According to the assessment by Clutch Consulting, 1,675 individuals enter homelessness annually in Hinds, Madison, Rankin, Warren and Copiah counties, with the majority of those in the city of Jackson; the number of individuals entering homelessness in the area has risen 47 percent since 2022.
Seventy-four percent of those 1,675 individuals use a shelter for the homeless and leave after an average of 50 days but 269 return within six months, according to the assessment.
Only about 150 individuals in the area are experiencing continuous, long-term homelessness each year, according to the assessment. “Those are the people we see sleeping outside or in encampments,” Brown said.
The assessment shows that tackling homelessness in Jackson is doable, Semple said.
The data in Jackson shows that the city does not have “explosive, unsheltered homelessness crisis,” she said. “The number of individuals sleeping outside is about 150 and that’s a very manageable place to be. With the first intervention you can easily eliminate that.
“The other challenge and opportunity we saw in the data is that the number of people falling into homelessness is increasing every year.”
It’s estimated there are more than 30 encampments in the city of Jackson, and one part of the plan would be to decommission all encampments and prevent anyone from returning, using closure maintenance partnerships, Brown said.
The need for housing is at the core of homelessness, Semple said, noting that it’s not the only part of the equation but certainly foundational.
The model Clutch Consulting promotes relies on team members who are responsible for working with local landlords and lining up housing, which is provided for a year for an individual who is part of an intervention. The goal is for individuals who receive housing to be able to find jobs, pay their own rent and be self-sustaining.
Semple said she met with service providers when she was in Jackson and got the sense that they’re proud of the work they do and eager to have more tools to deliver resolutions.
“That’s a beautiful place to start from,” she said. “There will be adjustments in the way they do business. They will help shape those adjustments as needed.”
Jill Buckley, executive director at Stewpot Community Services, said she feels very positive about the model Clutch Consulting uses because it promotes a broad collaboration among organizations already providing services to the homeless.
“It’s not about creating a new nonprofit,” she said. “It’s about organizing everyone to respond more effectively.”
Stewpot has a street outreach worker who visits encampments every day helping people, and Gateway Rescue Mission offers something similar, Buckley said.
Organizations in the area do a good job responding to the immediate needs of homeless individuals, Buckley said, but they need a better option to resolve homelessness.
Helping individuals go from the streets to housing would provide them with a better quality of life and could extend their life expectancy, she said. “It’s not that we want to take away any freedom,” she said.
Moving individuals from encampments and the streets to housing would mean nonprofits such as Stewpot would need to offer support to individuals who may not be used to resolving issues with a landlord or learning to pay utility bills, she said.
Liz Brister, president and chief executive officer of Downtown Jackson Partners, heard Semple speak at the International Downtown Association meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. “Everything she had to say I was drawn to,” she said.
People living on the streets is cited as a top issue by tenants and property owners who live and work in downtown Jackson, Brister said.
“The unhoused in downtown are very visible,” Brister said. “If you’re in downtown to work or live it’s a challenge because you don’t like seeing your fellow human beings living on the street.”
Capitol Police patrols downtown Jackson and security cameras are in place there but sometimes people don’t feel safe if they see someone who appears to be homeless, she said.
“If you go to suburban areas, you don’t experience this,” Brister said. “It puts Jackson at a disadvantage over our suburban counterparts.”
Downtown Jackson Partners is in favor of the city hiring Clutch Consulting Brister said, because of its track record in other cities.
According to the Clutch Consulting website, its work in Dallas has resulted in a 28 percent decrease in sheltered homelessness and in New Orleans, a 24 percent decrease in unsheltered homelessness.
Brister said the mayor in Dallas challenged Clutch to rehouse 100 individuals in 100 days, and Clutch surpassed that goal. Clutch rehoused 108 individuals, and of those, only 30 required more complex medical services than the program could provide, she said.
In New Orleans, Clutch’s work resulted in 300 people housed from inner core encampments and a 12 percent reduction in homelessness. In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 445 people were housed, a 43 percent reduction in chronic unsheltered homelessness from 2023 to 2025.
Ashby Foote, who represents Ward 1 on the city council, said the city has numerous nonprofits that do “a yeomen’s work to help the homeless,” but it should remain open minded about new approaches. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” he said.
Foote is unsure about where funding for the program would come from, given the shortfall the city is facing. “The mayor gave us a memo a week ago about a $20 million gap between what is budgeted for regular city services this year and what the city expects to get in this year from property taxes, sales taxes and other revenue,” he said.
The $3 million funds the city has that could be used for the program can only be used to provide services to the homeless, Buckley said, and for that reason it’s time for the city to act while those funds are available.
“This would be a very good use of those funds,” she said. “The majority of the cost is for stabilizing people who have experienced chronic homelessness with the goal of helping them live independently. It’s a longer runway for some people than others.”
Semple said Jackson has all the ingredients to tackle homelessness head on, naming a new city administration and the public-private partnership known as Jackson Rising that outlines a vision for the city’s future.
“Leadership really matters,” she said. “This is not an easy issue. It’s complex. Otherwise, it would have solved itself. It takes great leaders who care about their cities, want to leave a legacy and want to build a safety net for the entire community. In all of my years, it’s a key ingredient.”
