As Camp Hope faces cuts that will slash its shelter capacity, Comprehensive Healthcare President and CEO Jodi Daly, Ph.D., and Board Chair Ralph Conner are asking Yakima County for answers.
In a new guest commentary for the Yakima Herald-Republic, the two describe years of work between Comprehensive Healthcare and Camp Hope to embed behavioral health and substance use disorder services directly within the shelter, so providers can meet people where they already are, build trusting relationships and connect them to treatment and long-term support.
That progress is now at stake. Camp Hope learned last month that its coming fiscal year funding would total $129,831, about 20% of the $643,353 it requested, with less than two weeks to prepare for a reduction that will cut its bed capacity by more than half.
Daly and Conner acknowledge the county faced a difficult allocation process, but note that the 115 long-term care beds the county has proposed as a replacement, planned at the former St. Elizabeth Hospital, aren’t operational yet, while Camp Hope’s reductions have already begun.
From a public safety perspective, Yakima County Sheriff Bob Udell writes in the piece that law enforcement officers often rely on shelter capacity as a destination for people who need help but don’t require incarceration or hospitalization, and that reducing beds before replacement resources are ready risks increasing the time officers and first responders spend managing unsheltered homelessness instead of serving the broader community.
Daly and Connor ask the Board of County Commissioners to take two steps: publish a full accounting of outcomes from the previous funding cycle, and delay Camp Hope’s reductions until the St. Elizabeth beds are available. Both requests are a call for sequencing and accountability, not a rejection of the county’s direction, and point to Comprehensive Healthcare’s work embedding behavioral health services directly at Camp Hope as evidence that shelter and clinical care can work together to move people toward long-term stability.
Read the full guest commentary in the Yakima Herald-Republic here.
