History

2025

• Housing Immigrant Families Project: In response to urgent unmet housing needs, we supported a three-month pilot program that provided emergency winter shelter while developing referral and immigrant-friendly shelter policies and procedures. We provided back-end infrastructure for a collaborative of 17 immigrant service providers and cross-sector partners, facilitating decision-making, coordinating comprehensive program development, and addressing critical community needs. Project Sheet
• Partnerships in Housing and Mental Health: Leaders in housing and mental health agencies asked the RRT to plan and facilitate a process for them to move forward with strategies for successful behavioral/mental health and housing service collaboration. We convened partners around “right-fit” services (those that meet clients’ needs and adjust to them over time) and conducted three workshops that built a shared understanding of the collaborative landscape. Participants evaluated current partnerships, identified systems change opportunities, and developed strategies to enhance collaboration and community impact. Through this work, partners created an action plan to improve internal fee structures as their next step. Project Sheet
• Childcare Access in the Metro East: Through a partnership with RRT, Brightpoint will develop and implement a co-design process in which community partners, Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) leadership, and Brightpoint staff will identify, refine, and test one or more strategies for improving access to CCAP. Learnings will be leveraged to encourage statewide replication and to scale to additional, culturally responsive populations.
  • Pilot Objectives:
    • Build shared cross-sector understanding about how organizational policies and procedures limit access to the Child Care Assistance Program.
    • Leverage continuous improvement practices to co-develop and test possible intervention points.
    • Develop organizational tools, templates, and skills that support agile response to ongoing shifts in policy, resource, and collaborations.
• Tornado Recovery: On May 16, a tornado and severe storms struck St. Louis, killing five, injuring many, and damaging over 5,000 homes and businesses. RRT staff visited affected areas, built support systems, and connected those impacted with resources to help with immediate needs. As a core member of The People’s Response data team, RRT contributed over 200 hours of technical assistance on the ground in North City. Together, we built a multi-agency data infrastructure that triaged 10,131 needs assessments from 7,205 households.
• Marcel Hagens joined the RRT team as Program Manager.
• Housing and Mental Health Partnership: Chronically unhoused individuals need consistent cross-sector housing and mental health services support, but current service systems rarely meet this need. Many lack access to adaptable, appropriate services. While providers collaborate to fill these gaps with culturally appropriate offerings that demonstrate regional success, funding constraints, organizational red tape, regulatory requirements and other limitations stifle sustainability. Gateway Housing First tackled this challenge head-on by bringing essential collaborators to the table. Through a dynamic three-session workshop series, we guided participants through a journey of reflection, examining current partnerships, uncovering potential turning points for systems change, and crafting practical approaches to strengthen collaboration with one clear goal: making a meaningful difference in our community. Project Sheet

2024

• Heritage House Response: The RRT helped lead a collaborative response to the flooding and closure of a 19-story low-rent apartment complex in downtown St. Louis, where over 160 people were left without housing overnight. Heritage House Report
• Fall Forum on Housing and Mental Health: The RRT hosted an inaugural forum, a space for shared visioning and problem-solving around the most urgent housing and mental health needs in the St. Louis region. Over 100 registered to participate and attend the forum. 
• Program Manager Hired: Kaelin Richardson joined the RRT team as Program Manager.

2023

• Community Leadership: Dr. Jackson-Jennings led the original COVID-19 Steering Committee to establish an ongoing Advisory Council, which now guides the RRT in alignment with the Strategic Plan.
• Collaborative Action Network (CAN): CAN now operates as a smaller network of organizations aligned with the RRT’s mission and vision. Meeting quarterly, it supports the Advisory Council on regional issues and crises in greater St. Louis.
• Director of Operations Hired: Alaina Smith joined the RRT team as Director of Operations and the second full-time staff member.

2022

• Eviction Prevention: The pandemic led to a rise in evictions in the St. Louis region after the expiration of federal and local moratoriums. The eviction crisis had a disproportionate impact on already vulnerable low-income communities, particularly in majority-Black areas of North St. Louis County and neighborhoods of the city, further worsening existing housing inequalities. The RRT published an Eviction Prevention Report while hosting a data platform of new eviction filings, helping service providers target emergency financial assistance.
• St. Louis Floods: In July, major flooding hit the St. Louis region. Recognizing a gap in equitable funding for long-term recovery in the Metro East, the RRT partnered with funders who had dollars but limited capacity to reach Illinois partners. The RRT managed a rapid grant-making process that funded home rebuilding and repair programs in St. Clair and Madison Counties.  
• Three-Year Strategic Plan: October saw the completion and approval of the RRT’s Three-Year Strategic Plan, translating the rapid problem-solving of the early pandemic into an innovative model to design and test community solutions across issue areas. Under the leadership of Dr. Jackson-Jennings, the Steering Committee charges the RRT to continue crossing sectors and geographies, supporting the region in evolving through its crises by resourcing new approaches to partnership that advance changes in values, relationships, and structures.
• Comprehensive Report: In October, the RRT also published its Comprehensive Report, documenting the team’s history and achievements leading the cross-sector response to COVID-19.

2021

• Managing Director Hired: In August, Dr. Andrea Jackson-Jennings was selected as the RRT’s new Managing Director.
• Executive Assistant Hired: Carrie Crompton joined the RRT as Executive Assistant.
• COVID-19: RRT continued to manage Campaigns, CAN, and critical partner coordination efforts. By the end of 2021, the RRT had: 
  • Triaged equitable PPE access with a needs assessment of 350 organizations and targeted distribution of over 825,000 masks.
  • Supported hundreds of unhoused individuals, particularly during shelter-in-place orders, by brokering relationships between shelters, hotels, local government, and mental health providers.
  • Targeted vaccine outreach to specific vulnerable populations and helped study local vaccine efficacy, leveraging federal dollars as a primary partner on a $1.9 million National Institute of Health grant and a $500,000 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention project housed at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • Addressed response gaps for homebound older adults and people with disabilities by facilitating a referral network of 14 organizations that served 1,372 individuals with food, medicine, transportation, and housing stabilization.

2020

• COVID-19 Hit the St. Louis Region: In the earliest days of the pandemic, regional leaders grappled with an urgent question: How could an existing disaster response infrastructure created for tornadoes and floods address a slower-moving and all-encompassing pandemic, and where did it fall short? Emergency meetings between government officials and public health experts quickly grew to include nonprofits, funders, and grassroots advocates. With clarity that the pandemic would disproportionately devastate communities burdened by structural racism and longstanding disinvestment, they resolved to overcome “business as usual” fragmentation with collective strategy.
• Regional Response Team Established: Forty-three founding partners announced the St. Louis Regional Response Team (RRT) on April 8 with Dr. Jason Purnel at the helm. The network articulated four major goals:
  1. Identify and prioritize the critical needs of vulnerable populations
  2. Share effective solutions and approaches between providers in different areas of need. 
  3. Deploy critical resources in an efficient and coordinated manner. 
  4. Highlight needs and opportunities to funders, decision makers, and the broader community.
• COVID-19 Campaigns Launched: The RRT network identified critical service and infrastructure gaps that were not filled by existing efforts and required a more collaborative, cross-sector approach to ensure an equitable response to community needs. The RRT began organizing four primary campaigns:
  1. Homebound Initiative: Connected homebound older adults and people with disabilities to critical support services
  2. Protective Personal Equipment (PPE): Gathered and equitably distributed PPE to frontline workers, particularly in the human services and childcare sectors
  3. Unhoused Campaign: Partnered with medical providers, shelters, and other stakeholders to advocate for pandemic-responsive housing and support services, particularly in the city of St. Louis.
• Collaborative Action Network (CAN) Formed: In May, the Collaborative Action Network was established, serving as the primary vehicle to communicate and coordinate breaking public health needs and updates with hundreds of cross-sector organizations. The alliance united the expertise of government, philanthropy, social services, education, and healthcare sectors to  nimbly identify unmet needs and take coordinated action.
• Steering Committee Formed: The RRT’s Steering Committee was formed as the organization’s governing body, representing the St. Louis bistate geographic region (Missouri: Jefferson County, St. Charles County, St. Louis City, St. Louis County; Illinois: St. Clair County and Madison County), sectors, and industries.
• Managing Director Hired: Serena Muhammad was appointed RRT’s first Managing Director, collaborating with Co-Chairs Dr. Jason Purnell and Riisa Rawlins. Several initiatives were launched to enhance our community, with a focus on COVID-19. These programs included personal protective equipment, vaccine education, eviction prevention, and support for unhoused individuals.