Homeless Care Visionary Hailed On Retirement

More than 300 people filled Anthony’s Ocean View in Morris Cove to hug and celebrate Patti Walker, a local social-services leader with a big picture vision of human dignity and a big heart to go with it — who will be retiring from her leadership role at Continuum of Care after more than four decades at the helm.

That farewell fundraiser took place Wednesday evening at the 450 Lighthouse Rd. restaurant.

The story of Continuum of Care (COC) dates back to 1983, when a place called New Haven Halfway House — an early in-community home for people with mental health challenges, so they would not have to be institutionalized — had one modest building on Howard Avenue with four employees, 11 clients, and only nine months of funding remaining before the doors would shut.

They hired a young new director and charged her to figure out how to keep everything going.

Roll the clock ahead 41 years and COC is a state-wide $60 million organization, with 55 properties and facilities; with 900 employees, serving more than 2,000 adults with mental illness and a host of related challenges every year; and the nonprofit is the go-to contractor for compassionate and innovative care, especially in New Haven.

That ranges across a growing spectrum of mental health and homeless services from emergency and supportive housing, mobile crisis intervention teams, specialized care for vets, substance abuse help, and autism support. COC frequently works with highly complex cases that often other organizations won’t or can’t take on.

Walker will be working through July 1, she said, when her successor, Jim Farrales, takes the reins. He’s been with COC for 25 years, most recently as executive vice president and as Walker’s chief operating officer. 

“The transition will be seamless,” she said.

With a talent for modesty and a praising of others, Walker said she was a twenty-something master’s graduate in social work administration from Fordham University in New York City who answered a newspaper ad for the job that became COC.

“I grew with it,” is how she put it.

Board members and employees past and current gave particular praise to Walker’s and COC’s recent collaboration with the city to create the COMPASS Mobile Crisis team — an alternative to police 911 interventions, for people needing assistance due to mental health or substance abuse issues — that in the year and a half since launching has served 1,500 folks. 

And to the Emergency Housing Program — a one-of-a-kind-in-the-state program set in a city-owned transformed hotel setting up on Foxon Boulevard — which enables homeless people in transition to stay up to 90 days, and, with support, remain independent enough to begin to rebuild and recover.

Of COC’s $60 million annual budget, almost all of it is public funding from the city, the state, and federal grants, and that translates into a redoubtable $2 million payroll to be met twice a month, Walker said.

“We’re all about the people,” she explained, in a brief interview as tasty appetizers were served and embraces exchanged.

That is, the key to the success of the programs — and why funding agencies appear to award their granting dollars to COC with confidence — is the staff, Walker said. They year-in and year-out are dedicated to its compassionate mission, its creative approaches, and are always looking into the future at the next challenges.

And what might they be, in Walker’s near-retirement view? 

Everything COC does, Walker replied. It’s an incomparable range of services ​“we’re just going to need more of.”

That’s because life is growing more complex, she added, with more mental health illness complicated by people self-medicating with alcohol and other substance abuse.

Alas, she predicted, ​“Nothing we do will we have enough of. There never will be a lack of people who need our services. We’ve grown 15 percent a year,” Walker added, every year since she became director 40 years ago.

That was in part because much of Walker’s tenure has coincided both with crises to surmount, such as Covid, but also largely with a huge expansion of funding available for programs, particularly recently through ARPA (the American Relief Plan Act), and some of that funding is diminishing and then will disappear.

Organizationally that means that Walker’s successor Jim Farrales’s focus will be less on growth and more on what Walker calls ​“fine-tuning the infrastructure.”

And especially since Covid, said Farrales, when people grew more comfortable with working from home, staffing — especially getting the right compassionate staff for the group homes and for case managers — is one of the biggest challenges he’s facing. Namely, 100 openings for jobs currently in those capacities at COC.

Walker said she’s proudest not of the quantity and range of services she’s presided over but the level of compassionate one-to-one care throughout the organization; the state of the art best practice marks Continuum in fact received in a recent accreditation from CARF, an independent accreditor of health and human services groups worldwide.

“This is my baby,” she said as folks lined up to give Walker hugs and receive them in return. ​“It’s been the most amazing opportunity, the last 40 years, an absolute privilege, I couldn’t ask for a better staff, and I’m leaving with total confidence, although I’ll miss it terribly!”

“She’s a visionary,” said Dee Antunes, who’s been with COC for 21 years and is vice president for human relations. ​“She creates the possible out of the impossible.”