The Rapid City Police Department’s Quality of Life Unit is charged with building relationships with the visible part of the poverty spectrum (street level homeless, public inebriates, panhandlers, etc.) and connecting them with services.
The HOPE Center is a drop-in day center that provides basic services for both the transient part of the homeless spectrum as well as people living in the crisis of poverty who rely on the center for laundry, mail, and phone services. They conduct classes and activities for this demographic as well as offer a place for socialization.
CornerStone Rescue Mission is an (emergency) homeless shelter that provides many of the same services as the HOPE Center, but only for people who are clean and sober. They also offer case management and a daily soup kitchen serving three meals a day for anyone in the community.
Pennington County’s Care Campus serves a wide range of the spectrum - from the Safe Solutions concept, which provides a place for those under the influence to sleep it off, to detox and treatment services, crisis mental health care, and a wide array of health and human services.
OneHeart will provide a recovery-oriented environment for people living in the crisis of poverty to get the wrap-around assistance they need in stabilizing their lives and attaining a new level of independence. Additionally, being located next door to the Care Campus allows for cross-utilization of services, further reducing the need for expensive redundancies.
RCCI’s Housing Initiative is working to identify and fill gaps in the local housing market so that people have suitable, affordable places to live at all socioeconomic levels.
Multiple economic and workforce development initiatives are underway, including those led by Elevate Rapid City, Career Learning Center of the Black Hills, and Western Dakota Tech, that will work on industry diversification and workforce development, among other aspects, to create a more economically diverse and stable community and a more skilled workforce.
~ Charity Doyle, OneHeart Executive Director