More Than 2 Years Later, Cambridge HEART Still Struggling to Meet Original Mission

Two and a half years after its founding, the Cambridge Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team has yet to break through as a viable police alternative.

HEART, which launched their emergency call hotline service two months ago, is contracted by the city to provide violence prevention services. But at a Thursday panel hosted by The Black Response, HEART responder and Team Manager Barbara Ortiz said the organization is struggling to fulfill its original goal of providing a police alternative emergency response.

“The original vision had a lot more staff, a lot more support, like boards and working groups, and a different model,” Ortiz said. “The original vision involved somebody calling in, and then you go out in the van and you address a situation, instead of somebody calling the police.”

Ortiz, who spoke on behalf of the organization, said that since the HEART launched nearly two years ago, they have worked with at least 70 families to provide “emotional support and mutual aid.” They are currently in the process of onboarding three new responders.

Currently, HEART mostly provides services similar to “case management,” according to Ortiz. For example, a responder may accompany an individual to court cases or medical interviews or help someone negotiate difficult relationships.

“Right now we’re in this bridging phase, where we’re going from that to the original — trying to go towards the original vision of emergency,” Ortiz said. “But we still have people that we support in the more case management style.”

“People are not calling in a lot,” she said, adding that people are still reaching out to the organization via email.

Ortiz said the delay is due to a lack of resources and challenges HEART has faced in receiving grant funding.

“It took a lot longer to train everybody, and also the struggle for funding is real. We’re not able, until recently, to hire new people,” she said.

At the panel, representatives from alternative response groups around Massachusetts discussed the state of non governmental community safety teams in light of the election of Donald Trump. HEART is not alone in their struggles to provide emergency services.

Earl Miller, the former director of CRESS, Amherst’s unarmed community response team, said that non-governmental organizations often face obstacles in obtaining funding as time passes and people lose interest.

“I think that what happened to CRESS is what happens to these departments nationally, which is that in their moment, everyone supports it, people run on it,” he said. “But when that moment is over — the police don’t compete with the fire department for their funding, but alternatives compete with schools for funding, they compete with DPW for funding.”

He added that “inevitably, no department is going to survive” those tradeoffs.

Mona Igram of the Center for Public Representation in East Hampton said that while non-governmental response teams are beneficial, activists need to focus on reforming the 911 system in order to solve disparities.

“It's a hard system to change,” Igram said. “It’s very localized.”

“I think all of us would benefit from a different type of response,” she added.

—Staff writer Asher J. Montgomery can be reached at asher.montgomery@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @asherjmont or on Threads @asher_montgomery.