HIWAI NY is a program designed to diminish the cycle of chronic homelessness exacerbated by the frequency of mental illness amongst the homeless population through the provision and addition of art therapy sessions to the existing social services provided by supportive housing programs. Homeless persons experiencing mental illness are more susceptible to dropping out of supportive housing programs returning to the streets, overpopulated city shelters, emergency rooms and jails resulting in higher costs to the city and state. The program's intended beneficiaries are chronically homeless single adults who suffer from a serious mental illness or who are diagnosed as mentally ill and chemically addicted (MICA)" . The program's intended outcome is an accelerated improvement in mental health amongst this population resulting in a higher retention rate of this group within supportive housing units, ultimately reducing chronic homelessness.

The primary evaluation question is whether art therapy has a causal and positive effect on retention rates of populations in supportive housing units by way of improved mental well-being. The evaluation design is a randomized control test using difference in difference measurement, measuring the level of mental health of participants in treatment groups to which art therapy is administered before program implementation and after compared to a control group that does not receive art therapy. The mental health scores of the treatment group will then be analyzed in comparison to the control group to determine causality between improvement in mental health and higher retention rates in supportive housing units.

The activity or treatment offered by the HIWAI NY program is a combined 24 hours of art therapy to be effectuated over a period of 3 months.

The decision to administer the treatment of art therapy across groups of 12 people with a patient to teacher ratio of 4:1 is being adopted as informed by the Indian Journal of Psychiatry which recommends that persons experiencing acute psychotic symptoms, suicidal thoughts, and poor motivation would not benefit as much from a larger group setting. The program takes the risk of having some participants with these characteristics in our treatment groups into account as they will be randomly selected. Hourly sessions administered twice a week over the course of a short period (three months) was suggested to be the most effective dose of treatment by the same source. Once the treatment is administered in this most effective fashion, an improvement in mental health is expected to be seen resulting in lower attrition rates across the treatment group than the control group.

a. WORKPLAN AND DELIVERABLES. Provide a schedule that stipulates the deliverables against which tranches of the grant are to paid. Each tranche payment must be justified by one or more technical deliverable (each described in up to fifty words). All due dates must be stated in terms of the number of months from the grant effective date. Tranche percentages must sum to 100%. (Creation of a spreadsheet with three columns: Deliverable due date, Tranche percentage of total, and Description of technical deliverable.)

b. BUDGET. Provide a budget table indicating the required costs, including any contingencies. Include any donated resources at a cost of zero. Total costs must sum to no more than the requested grant amount (up to $500,000 over up to three years). Include a budget narrative (up to five hundred words). (The budget table and narrative should demonstrate the feasibility of completing the program and evaluation within the specified time and budget constraints. The budget table should list budget items in rows and months in columns and provide both row and column totals.)