The task of sheltering, feeding and otherwise helping as many as 12,000 homeless residents in Kansas falls largely on the shoulders of local communities. Now they’re about to get a little more help.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius will create a new council on homelessness to coordinate state government efforts to address the issue, a state official said Thursday. State departments of education, labor, commerce, corrections, social services and others will participate in the council in an effort to offer local agencies streamlined access to state assistance.

“All of these agencies have resources for the homeless,” Stephen Weatherford, president of the Kansas Development Finance Authority, told the Journal-World. “This is to better collaborate, coordinate those resources.”

Weatherford made the announcement Thursday at the Kansas Statewide Homeless Summit at Kansas University. The new council, he said, will make it easier for local agencies to approach the state for help.

“You won’t be dealing with five or six agencies,” he said. “You’ll have one application.”

Lawrence activists said they wanted to see more details of the proposed council.

“I’m all for streamlining,” said Tami Clark, director of the Lawrence Community Drop-In Center, which provides a variety of services to the city’s homeless. “That’s what we’re trying to do at the local level, make services more accessible to the people who need them.”

Weatherford also promised renewed efforts at legislative approval for a statewide home ownership program that would direct revenues to affordable housing efforts. Two previous attempts have been blocked in the Kansas House.

“It’s going to be difficult” to get passage this year, Weatherford predicted.

Bryon Lynn, 46, a homeless man from Lawrence, sits outside the Community Drop-In Center. The center is one place in Lawrence where homeless people can gather, eat breakfast, shower and spend time out of the weather. About 12,000 people statewide are homeless, and local communities are about to get some state assistance with the issue.

More than 300 social workers and activists attended Thursday’s summit, with attendees driving in from as far west as Dodge City and as far south as Independence.

“We really make an effort to reach the whole state,” said Randy Crandall, chairman of the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, a coalition of local advocacy organizations. The coalition formed in 2000 and has sponsored the summit each year since.

Mark Johnston, director of special needs programs for the U.S. Department of Housing and Development, told the summit that local agencies also could receive federal help — provided they work together. The department makes interagency cooperation a key criterion for grants; Kansas received $4 million in such funding last fiscal year, most of it for housing.

“Partnership is the central ingredient in getting HUD’s money,” Johnston said.

Seminars included sessions on helping homeless individuals with substance abuse and mental illness problems, faith-based approaches to the issue and education for homeless children.

“I think this summit has been the most informative of any I’ve attended,” Clark said.

Crandall said efforts to help the homeless were a critical part of society’s “safety net.”

“I really think it’s a barometer of our society,” he said. “It reflects our humanity, good or bad.”

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