What started as a pilot program in Durham three years ago has grown into the heartbeat of the city’s public safety network.
HEART, the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, launched as a pilot in 2022 under the Community Safety Department and has since responded to more than 28,000 calls. The original team operated with 20 employees during standard work hours, but after an expansion the following year, the program more than doubled to 50-plus employees across four units—community response, co-response, crisis diversion, and care navigation—and covered all of Durham. Now, with budget season under way, advocates are pushing for city leadership to once again bolster HEART’s resources to allow the team to operate around the clock and serve more residents in need during operating hours.
This year, Community Safety has requested a $4 million funding increase to hire 44 additional full-time employees, which would expand the operating hours for HEART’s crisis response teams to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and provide some overnight coverage for crisis call diversion.
The increased funding would also allow the crisis response team to get to a majority of “eligible” calls that flow to HEART from the 911 dispatcher. Currently, HEART teams are only able to respond to 50 to 55 percent of eligible calls overall, says Ryan Smith, director of the Community Safety Department. Last year, the team missed 20,000 calls.
The co-response team, which currently operates from six a.m. to nine p.m. and pairs a mental health professional with a police officer, is able to respond to 12 percent of eligible calls. Crisis call diversion, a small unit of mental health professionals in the 911 call center who support residents experiencing mental health crises, are now able to respond to about 75 percent of their eligible calls.
The next frontier,—and the reason many advocates want to increase funding for HEART—is overnight service. From midnight to six a.m., no HEART team is available to any resident.
Durham’s 911 call center responds to roughly 1,500 different call natures, from trespassing to heart attacks and shootings. Dispatchers use a series of pre-coded questions to navigate the caller—and the city’s public safety staff—through the most appropriate response. Calls involving mental health crises, trespassing, welfare checks, intoxicated individuals and other categories may receive a response from HEART only, or both HEART and Durham police depending on the situation.
While out on patrol, HEART team members can also “self-initiate” a wellness check, or what Smith often refers to as a “HEART assist,” if they see a person in need. They might pass out a water bottle on a hot day or the occasional tent for those seeking shelter. But Smith says those detours don’t take available teams away from their top priority, which is still responding to calls.
Even if the city council awarded Community Safety with the additional resources requested in the upcoming budget, Smith says the department would still need time to hire staff and ramp up services.
“Even if they gave us every resource to get to every single call next year, it wouldn’t happen next year,” Smith says.
At its core, HEART remains a response team, but their daily interactions with some of Durham’s most vulnerable residents have stretched their reach into other areas.
For years, the city has contracted with Housing for New Hope, a Durham supportive housing nonprofit, to conduct street outreach with Durham’s homeless population. The group spearheads the city’s Point in Time (PIT) Count each year. In recent years, HEART has deployed team members to support the PIT program. But at a Homelessness Services Advisory Council meeting on March 10, Housing for New Hope executive director Russell Pierce suggested that HEART take on the city’s street outreach efforts.
“It’s not something we can’t do, it’s not something we don’t want to do,” Pierce said, “but sometimes, as an organization, you have to reflect on what the greatest needs are and where you can make the greatest contribution. We realized that supportive housing is the place where we can have the greatest impact.”
Street outreach is a natural evolution for the HEART team. They employ a variety of highly skilled clinicians and health-care professionals, and regularly come in contact with neighbors in need of housing. But that hasn’t come without growing pains. Pierce and Smith agree that some outreach efforts have become duplicative as HEART has stepped into new territory. As part of the shift away from Housing for New Hope, Pierce says the HEART team will need to do a better job of tracking its interactions with unhoused residents so that nonprofits like Housing for New Hope can remain informed on what services folks are already receiving.
“If it’s not going to be Housing for New Hope … I think we’re well-situated to do that work,” Smith says.
Community Safety already has its hands full responding to calls. Even if they are equipped to perform street outreach, the department would need more staff and other resources— beyond even the requested budget increase—to fulfill this new role.
“That isn’t work that we can just easily pick up and do with the resources that we have because of the way our capacity is stretched, but is that something that we could do and do well? Yeah, I think so and I think it would make sense given how we’re positioned and given the hours that we cover,” Smith says.
Even without an influx of new funding, reinforcements could be on the horizon. On April 17, Durham city manager Bo Ferguson announced forthcoming changes to the city’s organizational chart. Starting in July, the Homelessness Services team, which is currently housed under Community Development, will move under Smith’s Community Safety Department.
“As Community Safety has grown, there’s been a focus on what I call stabilization: meeting people in crisis and trying to get them on a path toward stability,” Ferguson says. “[The HEART team] has really developed some skill sets—mental health connections, crisis intervention—and those skills and the understanding of the nonprofit networks in Durham felt very similar to the work we’ve been growing in homelessness response. We don’t lose any of the great resources we’ve built around housing, but we’re gaining some of the network support that we get from the nonprofit sectors who are doing work.”
HEART was formed following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as protests proliferated nationwide and advocates across the country pushed their local leaders to reimagine policing and public safety. In Durham, a coalition of local organizers successfully advocated for the city to create the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force. The task force’s recommendations brought the HEART pilot program, the first of its kind in North Carolina, to the Bull City.
“Honestly, it’s revolutionary,” says Shanise Hamilton, a member of Durham Beyond Policing.
Durham Beyond Policing is one of a handful of organizations that have banded together as the “Have A Heart Coalition” to push the city council into providing more resources for Community Safety. Hamilton says that the group plans to continue pressuring local officials to expand HEART’s footprint beyond city limits into the county and the public school system. So far, the coalition’s efforts have been rewarded; HEART has seen significant growth each year since the pilot launched.
Three years later, HEART continues to be a beacon of hope for Durham residents.
“Whenever I see the HEART vans driving down the street and I’m with my kiddos, they’re like celebrities to us,” Hamilton says.
The city council will receive FY 2025-26 budget recommendations from Ferguson at the May 19 city council meeting.
This story is part of an ongoing INDY series about the City of Durham budget process. A previous version focused on fare-free buses.
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