After years of struggling for funding and undergoing leadership changes, HEART, the nonprofit alternative response team approved by City Council in 2021, has switched to providing services for community building and violence prevention.
HEART, or Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team, was conceived after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, when cities across the country made efforts to develop new approaches to emergency response that did not involve police. In Cambridge, Loius DePasquale, the city manager at the time, created the Task Force to Examine the Future of Public Safety in Cambridge to propose changes to the city’s approach to public safety.
HEART was pitched to the city by The Black Response, which had a member on the task force. It was intended to coordinate with the city but still act independently. Instead, the city created its own version of HEART, the Community Safety Department, said Quinton Zondervan, a former city councilor and president of HEART.
Funding promised, not received
As proposed, HEART was supposed to be funded by grants from the city. It had originally asked for $2 million in funding to hire a 20-person response team, which the city declined to do, instead forming its own Community Safety Department as an alternative response approach. HEART was promised some funding from the Community Safety Department’s $3 million budget in the fiscal year 2023 by DePasquale.
“Ultimately, very little of that money was appropriated towards community organizations,” said Zondervan. According to HEART’s website, it intended to have a mobile crisis response team in 2025. As of this year, Zondervan says that it is no longer operational.
Instead, Zondervan said the organization’s work has become centered around community building and working with people before an emergency occurs. HEART’s services include a hotline where callers leave a message about their concerns and a team member will get back to them. It also has six working groups that include topics such as domestic violence and sexual assault assistance, grant writing, communication, fundraising and developing new solutions to respond to mental health crisises and community safety programs.
Zondervan attributed the switch in HEART’s goals to funding challenges and restructuring within the organization, including leadership changes.
Currently, a majority of its funding comes from private donors and foundations. Last year, the organization received more than $150,000 in donations and grants from other organizations.
The team still gets some money from the city. In 2024, after more than a year of negotiations, the city finalized giving HEART a $300,000 grant using federal relief funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
“It’s been a lot less than we were expecting and hoping (for), and it really has prevented the organization from fully developing into what we had envisioned,” Zondervan said.
What is an alternate response team?
Alternative response teams is a broad descriptor for a team that can cover a variety of jobs and are meant to reduce the amount of unnecessary contact between the police and community members, according to Scarlet Neath, director of Reimagining Public Safety at the Policing Project.
These programs look to “match the services and responses with the need,” said Neath. They hope to decrease the risk of escalation, get people the help they need that police might not be trained to give and save police time and resources for more appropriate calls.
These teams can take up one of three models, wrote Sean Wire in an email, a criminologist working at RTI International, a nonprofit research institution dedicated to improving the human condition. A co-response team sees counselors accompany patrols; community response model has a team of counselors and staff respond in place of a patrol; and crisis call diversion, where issues are addressed over the phone to preempt or to replace a patrol response.
HEART’s current structure makes it a crisis call diversion team.
Cities take different approaches to organizing such teams, according to Neath. Some are city or government run, others are run by nonprofits and there are some that have transitioned between both models.
These teams are usually either run in partnership with a city government so that they can access 911 calls and data or access that information through a third-party contractor. However, Wire wrote in an email that using a third party contractor can jeopardize access if the contract changes.
Alternative response teams are usually staffed by a mix of licensed social workers, people trained to handle mental health crises and people with lived experience, said Neath.
Cambridge HEART’s model states that its team is not required to have licenses, do not act as mandatory reporters, do not act with the police and include people within the community and marginalized populations.
“Because the city basically has to send mandatory responders, and they often correspond with the police,” Zondervan said. “It means that there’s always going to be some people in the community who will not call the city, and for those people especially, it’s really important that we have a service like HEART available.”
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