Since September, a team of Clinton School students has worked with Little Rock’s Transportation Alliance Project (TAP), a pilot fare agreement program that provides individuals experiencing homelessness with free, reliable transportation.
Led by the Arkansas Homeless Coalition, the Little Rock Mayor’s Office, and Rock Region Metro Transportation Division, TAP partners with 13 local nonprofits and organizations that provide homeless services, including the Jericho Way Resource Center, Our House Shelter, and the Arkansas Employment Career Center.
The Clinton School team – Cassidy Mitchell (Corning, Ark.), Katerina Noori (Chandler, Ariz.), Leslie Parker (Dierks, Ark.), and Michael Webb (Overland Park, Kansas) – researched the effectiveness of the program through a combination of focus groups and interviews with participants in the program and case managers from the partner nonprofits.
“From the beginning, we identified transportation as a problem,” said Ceanne Warner, Vice President of the Arkansas Homeless Coalition and supervisor of the Clinton School team. “We asked ourselves, “If we were able to provide transportation, is it going to help people experiencing homelessness exit that situation?’”
The transportation program was created in February 2019 to improve the lives of individuals experiencing homelessness and ultimately help them move into stable housing arrangements. In just over a year, TAP has provided 166,805 rides for roughly 1,400 registered participants.
In addition to their research, members of the team attended monthly Arkansas Homeless Coalition meetings to help them better understand the community and different stakeholders.
“The meetings gave us a sense of the organizations in Little Rock doing work with individuals and families experiencing homelessness,” Noori said. “It helped us begin to understand the dynamics between the administration of the TAP program and the partnering organizations.”
Noori explained that all of the team’s recommendations came directly from the feedback of participants and case managers working with the program. Case managers offered more insights that were administrative in nature – policies and communication – while the participants provided feedback on the accessibility and use of the buses. “The case managers and participants are the ones who came up with how to solve these problems,” Noori said.
The team will present its findings through an online presentation on Wednesday, April 8.
“They did a really good job of finding some places where we could improve,” said Warner, who has previewed the team’s findings. “I enjoyed getting the feedback and seeing that they saw, after they talked to the case workers and the participants in the program, that it’s helping to get them to the location that they need to get to, whether that’s work, school, a doctor’s appointment, or to get food, it’s allowing them to be mobile and that is enhancing their standard of living.”
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