This article describes a community mental health agency's process of screening supportive housing applicants with histories of violent felonies and serious mental illness. The agency adopted its corporate intranet as a tool so that geographically dispersed senior staff could participate in information gathering in order to ensure expert input in admissions decisions. This broad-based participation was designed to maintain community safety, while making the agency's residential resources available to people with mental illness and criminal histories. Considering the high recidivism rate of ex-offenders with mental illness and lack of clearly established best practices to serve them in the community, the authors believe that it is timely for housing providers to reevaluate how to better serve these individuals.

Among the many issues regarding the care of chronic mental patients, none is more pressing than the need for administrative and clinical models designed to organize and systematize the efforts of diverse community service providers. This paper describes the functioning of the Community Residential Treatment Service of the South Beach Psychiatric Center, a large‐scale project of a state facility created to respond to this issue. By blending sophisticated clinical and administrative technology, programs operated by the state, voluntary, and proprietary health care sectors have been integrated to form a balanced service delivery system. This system provides a broad continuum of inpatient and outpatient residential settings developed in accordance with social learning principles. The components of the system, with the Community Residential Treatment Service as the major integrative force, are linked together by detailed contracts as well as common behavioral clinical and behavioral administrative language. The treatment successes of this sytem have been significant enough to suggest that a positive synergistic effect is generated by this programming combination.

This article describes how single-parent families separat ed by homelessness, parental mental disability, and, often, substance abuse are reunited by the Emerson-Davis Family Center (Center), a demonstration project of the Institute of Community Living, Inc., in New York City. Experience with this project suggests that a well-designed congregate care apartment program can be used to create a nurturing home fo r recovering adults and their young children. In addition to residential services, the Center directly provides or case manages a comprehensive array of family clinical, educational, and preventive services. The project's methods are promising in both human and fiscal terms.

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