Portland Street Response (PSR) is a new first responder program for non-emergency calls involving people experiencing homelessness or mental health crisis. The program launched on February 16, 2021 in the Lents neighborhood in Portland, OR and operates Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 6 PM. The pilot is coordinated by Portland Fire & Rescue (PF&R), and the founding team consists of a firefighter paramedic, a licensed mental health crisis therapist, and two community health workers. The team is dispatched from the Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) when a caller reports one or more of the following and the individual has no known access to weapons and is not displaying physically combative or threatening behavior.

The mixed-methods evaluation is comprehensive, community centered, and includes feedback from a variety of stakeholders and sources, including interviews with unhoused community members and others served by Portland Street Response. This six-month program evaluation report summarizes the findings of our evaluation thus far. However, the evaluation is ongoing and will culminate in a one-year program review at the end of the pilot period in spring 2022.

Read the full report here.