People of Housing Security:
Danielle Sorden

In 2010, Danielle Sorden was working at the Bloomington Housing Authority when she first heard about the Housing First concept. The approach prioritizes moving the most vulnerable unhoused people into permanent housing and providing supportive services they need to remain housed and healthy.

At a community meeting Danielle attended, someone from the Indiana Housing & Community Development Authority (IHCDA) told the group that Bloomington would be a great place to build permanent supportive housing. He told them that such housing would allow people to remain housed even if they still struggled with addictions or mental health issues.

“I just thought that was the greatest idea I’d ever heard,” Danielle recalls. “Finally, someone won’t become homeless just because they’re making a mistake, because they’re struggling. I just loved that idea.”

She decided right then that somehow, she was going to be part of it. And she is.

Today, Danielle is Director of Housing First Programs at Beacon Inc. She supervises a six-person staff that will soon expand significantly, thanks to a recent grant for supportive services. This team provides services for residents of Crawford Apartments, a permanent supportive housing complex on the city’s south side, as well as at other locations in Bloomington.

“A lot of people don’t understand that the people we house at Crawford are the people with the highest vulnerability in the community,” Danielle explains. “A lot of these people would be dead if they were not housed.”

Residents of Crawford often suffer from the worst physical and mental illnesses of anyone in the homeless population, Danielle says. And even if they aren’t always able to recover from their addictions or mental illnesses right away, she adds, “keeping them housed keeps them safer than they ever would be on the street.”

Most of the ambulance runs to Crawford stem from chronic health issues, like diabetes and heart disease, she notes. “It’s not all overdoses, people!”

Danielle has been at Crawford since it opened in 2013, initially spending half of her time there. As assistant director of Shalom (now known as Beacon), she also supervised other staff and was in charge of the day center. In 2017 when Crawford II Apartments opened, she transitioned to her current position full time.

She is also this region’s lead for Coordinated Entry, a multi-agency regional collaboration that prioritizes housing placements based on an individual’s assessed vulnerability. That role stems from her history of piloting an assessment tool that’s now mandated by the state, and from being part of a small group that started Coordinated Entry before it was required for agencies receiving federal funding through the state.

Danielle is also a member of the local Built for Zero team, an effort led by Heading Home that’s making systemwide changes to improve the region’s ability to move people into housing.

“I bought into the Housing First idea before it really existed. It seemed so intuitive and factual … that we shouldn’t make someone homeless because they’re suffering from a sickness.”

The path to her current career wasn’t always clear.

Danielle’s family is from Rocky Ripple, a small town north of Butler University in Indianapolis, where her grandmother still lives. She moved to Brown County when she was five, then returned to Indy as a teenager. She lived in Key West for about a year after high school, then returned to Brown County. There she lived in an apartment she describes as uninhabitable and dangerous – Brown County didn’t have a rental inspection program. So when she found an apartment in Bloomington and secured a Section 8 housing voucher, she moved again.

She lived at Henderson Court Apartments until her daughter Savanah was about two years old. At that time her family was earning enough to move out of subsidized housing. They found a place on the Hill – the Crestmont neighborhood where the Bloomington Housing Authority is located.

Danielle became certified in massage therapy and got interested in prenatal massage. Teaching infant massage led to her assisting women when they went into labor. She assisted in 14 births, but with a young child, it was hard to be on call.

So Danielle decided to go to college, starting her undergraduate studies at age 29. Her original plan was to go to law school. But after graduating from IU, she was burnt out on school and ended up taking a job at the Bloomington Housing Authority. She was coordinator for the family self-sufficiency and home ownership program, and also did event planning. She managed BHA’s community center, and started a food pantry there.

She worked for BHA from 2008-2013, and it was during that time when she learned about Housing First. She tracked Beacon’s progress in creating permanent supportive housing and when there was a job opening related to that, she applied.

“I wanted to be on the ground floor of [permanent supportive housing] and wanted to help build that,” she says. “I bought into the Housing First idea before it really existed. It seemed so intuitive and factual that it’s how humans should behave – that we shouldn’t make someone homeless because they’re suffering from a sickness.”

She knows people in the community get frustrated that the number of people experiencing homelessness hasn’t declined dramatically after permanent supportive housing was built. But that number would be even higher without it, she notes. “Without us and Kinser Flats (permanent supportive housing operated by Centerstone), there’d be another 150 people on the street right now.”

When she’s not working, Danielle enjoys spending time with her daughter and hanging out with Ollie, her fluffy black “pyrenewf” — a term she coined for the mix of Great Pyrenees and Newfoundland. “He’s gigantic,” she laughs. “People pull over their cars to look at him.”

Note: This series highlights the work of those committed to improving the lives of residents in South Central Indiana. Find all the articles in this series here.