Over a dozen agencies meet at Park U to address metro homelessness. What can be done?

KANSAS CITY METRO (KCTV) - This first-ever summit at Park University will help area organizations see what others are doing to help the housing insecurities and homelessness in the KC Metro they call an ever-increasing concern.

The Housing Insecurity Summit will be at the Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel on Park University’s campus that’ll have a panel with a public question-and-answer session, brainstorming solution sessions, and discussion. Organizations will present information on how each of them is dealing with a variety of concerns with homelessness, including action steps they’re taking, what the community is taking, and the resources available.

Park University’s Department of Criminal Justice Administration, Department of Social Work, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Networking, Training, Education, and Research will be facilitating the event. The event is open to the public from 8:30 to 11 a.m. It will also be available online at ParkUMedia.com but you won’t be able to ask questions if you join online.

Dr. Tami Radohl, Park University Associate Professor of Social Work said, “We realized too not all law enforcement agencies know what resources are out there and vice-versa, there’s a lot of different social services agencies who don’t understand law enforcement’s role and what they do to help support folks experiencing either housing insecurity or homelessness.”

Kansas City leaders released a 92-page plan to address homelessness, as we’ve previously reported. Their “Zero KC” plan is based on five pillars: Living outside is dangerous, Kansas City needs more housing, wrap-around services are critical, one size does not fit all, and solving homelessness requires investment.

Radohl said the two goals they want to see today are to pull resources together and discuss the next steps with the organizations or funders.

Each county, city, and organization have its own way of handling homelessness and housing insecurity in its area – but Radohl and the school want ideas centralized to problem-solve.

A big thing they’ll talk about Wednesday morning is point-in-time counts that agencies have to do to get federal and state funding.

“What the numbers are, what we know about, what we don’t know about, and so forth,” she said. “COVID made it very challenging to get really good, accurate information, and so I think there are even some holes in our data understanding the scope.”

She said this will be a great opportunity to focus on there are insecurities that are all over the metro, not just in Johnson and Jackson counties.