Category: Kansas City Missouri

Just a few weeks after drop-in services ended for the mentally ill, including many homeless persons, at the Frank Williams Housing Resource Center in Kansas City, Kan., a proposal has been made to consolidate homeless services in Wyandotte County with Jackson County, Mo.

Wilba Miller, Unified Government community development director, said a merger is being proposed for the Wyandotte County and Jackson County Continuum of Care, to make a bistate regional program. She made her remarks at the UG’s Administration and Human Services Committee meeting Monday night.

“We are at a very exciting time and have a unique opportunity to take advantage of something only a few communities and continuums have done in the U.S.,” said Kerry Wrenick, who has worked with homeless youth and families in the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools for about six years and is the chairperson of the Wyandotte Homeless Coalition Services board. She said she hoped to gain support for a bistate merger with the Continuum of Care in Jackson County, Mo.

The Continuum of Care is mandated by Housing and Urban Development and coordinates housing services for the homeless, Wrenick said. The Wyandotte Homeless Services Coalition manages about $1.5 million that comes into Wyandotte County to address the needs of the homeless, she said.

When the coordinator of the WHSC resigned last year, it gave the group an opportunity to evaluate the best approach to ending homelessness in the community, Wrenick said.

“We need an accountable, responsive infrastructure to address homelessness, that promotes collaboration and coordination,” she said.

Other goals the communities can agree on include the need for collaboration with nearby communities, the need to raise awareness for support to end homelessness, building support among elected officials, identifying partners and enhance connections with other community initiatives, and identify ways to track best practices that lend itself to design and implementation of an outcome-measurement process, she said.

Since August 2015, Wyandotte Homeless Services Coalition representatives have met with their counterparts in Jackson County to discuss a merger, she said. They also met with the local HUD office, which said it would like to see collaboration, she added.

The current workload to manage a COC handling $1.5 million is more than a single person can handle, Wrenick said.

“The overflow is burning out our volunteers, who need to focus on housing homeless individuals and families, and staff does not have the margin for systems change work that our new federal regulations are requiring,” Wrenick said.

That was noticed in a recent cutback in one of the homeless service providers in Wyandotte County, she said.

Another is a lack of a unified system and fluidity of those living in homeless situations. “They go back and forth across state lines,” she said. “That means absolutely nothing to our populations. So they are accessing resources wherever they can travel to. The state line has absolutely no relevance to them.”

Wrenick said the point in time count is submitted to HUD every year, but educational homeless youth are not included in that count. The count says there are about 100 homeless persons here, but more than 850 homeless youth are being served now in the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools, she said. Last year there were about 1,400 youth served.

“Our numbers of family and youth is our fastest-growing population, where right now, funding is headed,” she said.

After wrapping up a focus on veteran and chronic homelessness in 2016, the next focus will be on children and families in 2020, she said.

Wrenick said the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools had to budget about $500,000 last year to pay for transportation, and that service must be provided to the families.

She said consolidation is a good idea because Wyandotte County would have access to a fuller range of homeless services and better coordination. By pooling resources, Wyandotte County will have the ability to recruit and hire an exceptional leader; and it would be able to seek resources from private foundations and donors who require a collaborative and regional approach. The leader would be a single point of contact to engage new partners and engage connections with other community initiatives, she said.

Wrenick said she would like to submit the merger sometime in March to HUD, and have it completed by mid-summer.

Commissioner Melissa Bynum said she was concerned that after a merger, there might not be a Wyandotte County location and that it might be served in a marginal way. She wanted some reassurance that that would not happen.

Wrenick said current funded programs and agencies that receive HUD funding are not in jeopardy of losing their funding. Funding will remain as is as long as the program is able to meet its outcomes and is serving the population it is supposed to serve, she said.

Wrenick said Wyandotte County is not in jeopardy of losing current funded programs, she said.

Miller said if an application for one of the agencies is not approved, those funds might become available for anyone in the bistate area, and she was concerned about it. However, the coalition pointed out that a lot of the agencies already were bistate agencies, she said.

Wrenick said some of the issues have already been addressed in the new bylaws.

Commissioner Jane Philbrook said she would like to see the bylaws guarantee that the funds now here are not handed over to another group or area.

“The HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) is very, very important,” Commissioner Philbrook said. “That way, we’re not spending money two or three times, we know where the money’s going and we can help the people stay in that care.”

Commissioner Harold Johnson said it is vitally important to make sure there is a presence, whether bricks and mortar or human capital, in Wyandotte County. While he is an advocate for efficiencies, he wanted to reiterate what others had said, that he wanted Wyandotte County to be represented.

Wrenick said that has been included in the bylaws, and there will be three representatives from Wyandotte County and three from Jackson County to make up the board.