Birmingham has signed a new $1.7-million agreement with a San Francisco nonprofit that hires people who were formerly incarcerated to operate a call center and work to help homeless people find housing.

“It’s a person coming to them with lived experience, with an empathetic ear and an understanding of what they’ve gone through,” said Kirkpatrick Tyler, Urban Alchemy’s Chief of Community and Government Relations.

Urban Alchemy, based in San Francisco, will be paid up to $1,717,881 under a contract with the city to provide “community engagement and outreach, homeless outreach, interim housing, hygiene services, street cleaning, and community response to non-emergency 911 and other calls related to homeless, mental health, and addiction to address the challenges created by the intersection of poverty, mental illness, addition and homelessness.”

The call center is expected to open in January 2025.

“We are excited about serving alongside Urban Alchemy to support our unhoused communities,” said Birmingham Mayor Randall L. Woodfin. “These residents deserve specialized services and care, and we aim to support them using our best resources and our heart. HEART Birmingham will be transformative for our unhoused community and for Birmingham at large.”

The Homeless Engagement Assistance Response Team is a community-based public safety program that will begin responding to non-emergency situations involving homeless people. Currently, such calls are handled by police.

“When an unhoused neighbor is experiencing a crisis, they often panic when an armed, uniformed law enforcement officer shows up, which can lead to unnecessary escalation that can have tragic outcomes,” said Tyler.

“Our team members are trained to empathize and calm everyone involved down. They then offer to connect the person in crisis to resources they may need, such as shelter and medical care.”

HEART team members will contact emergency services directly when they respond to a call that becomes violent or requires medical intervention. The HEART program is tentatively scheduled to launch at the beginning of 2025 and employ a team of nearly 20 people. Teams will respond to calls from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

Urban Alchemy operates similar programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin. Its team members will respond to non-emergency 911 and 311 calls relating to unhoused residents. The team will focus on de-escalating situations, connecting people to resources and making neighborhood residents – housed and unhoused alike – feel safer, Tyler said.

More than 90 percent of Urban Alchemy employees have experienced long-term incarceration, homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, Tyler said.

At times, its staff members have been accused of being involved in unlawful activity.

“All of the cases, we’ve either been found not guilty or not at fault,” Tyler said.

At its program in Lower Knob Hill in San Francisco, one of its staff members was shot.

“There was a practitioner who got into a shootout,” Tyler said.

“We hired against our regular practice. When we enter into a community, we’ll hire someone from that neighborhood. Unfortunately, that individual lived in that neighborhood, had an issue with another person who lived in that neighborhood. They had an altercation. It wasn’t because of the shelter. It was because of an existing issue.”

While it’s not perfect, studies have shown the Urban Alchemy approach to be successful, he said.

“There are challenges,” Tyler said.

A lawsuit in Sausalito made accusations that staff had sold drugs.

“Because we are an organization of formerly incarcerated people, that’s an accusation that we face,” he said.

“We were cleared of any wrongdoing,” Tyler said. “The things our practitioners were being accused of were not true.”

Urban Alchemy is also one of three finalists for another city contract to operate a tiny home community for homeless people in Birmingham, along with Faith Chapel Care Center and AIDS Alabama. That contract will be awarded later this year, said Meghan Venables-Thomas, director of community development for the city.

Last year, Portland approved a five-year contract for up to $50 million for Urban Alchemy to manage its mass shelter sites for people experiencing homelessness.

For more information about HEART Birmingham, go to www.birminghamal.gov/heart. More information about Urban Alchemy’s programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin is available at www.urban-alchemy.us.