Tedford Housing

The ultimate goal of Tedford Housing’s case management services continues to be to help homeless children, youth, adults and families move to or maintain permanent housing and to seek treatment for significant barriers to sustaining stable housing. Having stable and permanent housing is a cornerstone of one's quality of life. When stability is lacking and emergency housing is needed, one's entire life circumstances become very complicated very fast.

Tedford's mission focuses on creating pathways from homelessness to home by partnering with people and their communities in Midcoast Maine. Our case managers not only make sure the people we work with have shelter, but also give them the tools and resources they need to ensure they will successfully maintain housing. With the stability of housing, our clients (and neighbors) are then more able to pursue employment, education and other basic needs.

Case management services will continue to be utilized as a strategy to aid the rising number of families and single individuals Tedford Housing serves in its shelter, outreach and homeless prevention programs. Case management is a collaborative and planned approach to ensuring that a person who experiences homelessness gets the services and supports they need to move forward with their lives.
The goal of case management is to empower people, draw on their strengths and capabilities, and promote an improved quality of life by facilitating timely access to the necessary supports, thus reducing the risk of homelessness and enhancing housing stability. The case manager assists each participant to organize the various logistics needed to make contact for appointments and to ensure attendance at and follow-up to appointments.

Housing navigation services include conducting an assessment to determine the needs of the shelter guest, developing what is called the "housing stability plan" and working with the guest to secure and move into affordable housing. Navigation services also include working with various agencies to secure rental assistance vouchers when identified, as well as other community resources and services benefiting the guest post shelter stay.

Once a family or individual secures housing, the family and adult shelter case managers will continue to "follow" their clients for a period of time to ensure a successful and sustainable housing placement. Outreach clients work with a case manager to regain and maintain stability in their current situation. This could mean providing rental assistance, helping with budgeting, or with accessing other necessary services.

Tedford Housing has been addressing homelessness in the Brunswick area since 1987, providing a continuum of services from prevention programs to emergency shelter, community outreach, case management and supportive housing for families and adults who are homeless.

Giff Jamison, Tedford's director of operations, oversees all of Tedford Housing's programs and services and supervises all of the agency's case managers. Giff has over 30 years experience in the nonprofit social services sector with 13 years working in homelessness. Our case managers are also provided clinical supervision on a monthly basis from a licensed clinical social worker.

All of the case management staff meet as a team monthly to review clients, to learn about new program delivery components and expectations and to learn from each other about client engagement, record keeping, community resources and effective motivational strategies.

Tedford Housing's business manager provides quality assurance functions for the entry of data by the case management staff for the ESHAP program. Timely, complete and accurate data entry into the Homeless Management Information System is critical to the measurement of program benchmarks and thus the level of funding from MaineHousing to Tedford.

Tedford has a strong network and excellent reputation with community resources and community solutions groups.

In fiscal year 2019, Tedford Housing sheltered 86 single adults and 23 families with 68 family members in its emergency shelters, housed 44 families with 78 family members in its 37 supportive housing units and helped 195 households that included 443 people with homeless prevention and outreach services.

Of the 23 families served during FY19, 17 families exited, with 6 households remained in the family shelter at the end of June. Of the 17 families that exited the shelter, 15 families, or 88.24%, moved into permanent housing. 2 families, or 11.76%, returned to the adult shelter after losing custody of their child(ren) and continued case management at the adult shelter with a goal of securing permanent housing.