photo by: Contributed

Members of the City of Lawrence's Homeless Outreach team are pictured. In the back row from left to right are Joshua Gapetz, an outreach worker with the City of Lawrence; Nick Casarona, a substance use disorder clinician with Mirror Inc.; Dustin Moore with Artists Helping the Homeless; Brett Hartford, the director of the Homeless Resource Center; and Asher Erickson, a behavioral health homeless outreach worker with Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center. In the front row from left to right are Kristin Demby with the City of Lawrence; Director of Homeless Solutions Misty Bosch-Hastings; Homeless Project Specialist Cicely Thornton; Shannon Wells, the executive director of the Lawrence Humane Society; and Savannah Fergus, a housing and emergency shelter placement navigator with the Lawrence Community Shelter.

Though the city’s new Homeless Response Team only recently began its work, the team is already gearing up for its first major outreach event.

On Tuesday, the Homeless Response Team is hosting an “integrated outreach” event, making various local and regional service providers available from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. along a block near downtown Lawrence. The event will take place along 10th Street between Vermont and Kentucky streets, the roadway just in front of the Homeless Resource Center — formerly known as the Drop In and Rest Center — at 944 Kentucky St.

The event will take place immediately following two other nearby outreach events for the unhoused population that same morning: the free breakfast provided by First United Methodist Church’s Jubilee Cafe and a pop-up health clinic hosted by LMH Health and Heartland Community Health Center.

On Thursday, the Journal-World spoke with two staff members in the city’s Homeless Solutions Division to learn more about how the integrated outreach event will work and how it came to be.

The idea started with a visit to the Topeka Rescue Mission, Homeless Project Specialist Cicely Thornton told the Journal-World. The agency facilitates a mobile access partnership program so members of the unhoused population can access services from a number of collaborating agencies all from one single predetermined location twice a week. Thornton has been observing and shadowing at the biweekly Topeka event for the past several weeks.

“I went up there and shadowed with them, thought of the benefit, how great it would be to do something similar to that here in Lawrence,” Thornton told the Journal-World. “Since I’ve been around here forever, I know a ton of folks, so I just started getting a hold of people that I thought would be useful to come out.”

Thornton rattled off a lengthy list of agencies that quickly signed on to participate when she began planning the event about two weeks ago. That includes familiar local faces like Artists Helping the Homeless, the Homeless Resource Center, the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, Just Food and the Lawrence Humane Society.

Then there are partners like Lawrence Heights Christian Church, whose “Washed Ministries” program provides a free shower and laundry trailer for the homeless, and Salon 741, which will offer free haircuts.

The result will be a wide array of services available to unhoused people, all along a single city block. The Kansas Department for Children and Families will be on hand to help participants sign up for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a mobile DMV unit will work in conjunction with the Douglas County Reentry Program to help people obtain identification on the spot.

“It’s going to be a really big day,” Thornton said. “It’s a heck of a list. I’m excited and nervous all at the same time, but I’m super excited for our folks — I’ve heard really, really great feedback already. I think there’ll be a fairly decent amount of folks that will show up and utilize these resources.”

And if it’s anything like what Thornton has seen work well in Topeka, Lawrence’s first integrated resource event will provide an example of community.

“It was nice to walk into a space where people felt comfortable asking questions, people felt comfortable engaging in services,” Thornton said. “That’s such a huge part of it, right? That rapport, building those relationships, that was one of the big things. … I think that was the biggest thing I saw there and something I thought would be super beneficial here, so we’ll just mimic it and hope to have a very similar outcome to what they do.”

At the moment, it’s unclear how frequent these integrated outreach events may be moving forward, but Thornton said the Homeless Response Team will see how this first one goes and consider what makes sense from there. Either way, she said her hope is that they’ll become a regular occurrence.

It all gets at the idea of removing the “silos” that often exist when it comes to the ways social service providers work together — or don’t — to help the unhoused population, Director of Homeless Solutions Misty Bosch-Hastings told the Journal-World. Bosch-Hastings said the team isn’t having a hard time getting agencies to agree to collaborate on efforts like this, however, and to have pulled together an event of this magnitude so quickly is “rare.”

“That says a lot about the community and how invested they are in doing good and helping others,” Bosch-Hastings said.

On top of that, Bosch-Hastings noted that the event is an example of one of the many actions called for in the city and Douglas County’s joint plan to eliminate chronic homelessness, “A Place for Everyone.” As the Journal-World has reported, the plan calls for tens of millions of dollars in estimated spending, but Bosch-Hastings said this event is an example of efforts that effectively don’t cost the city a thing.

It’s still early on in the life of the Homeless Response Team, which was granted funding approvals from the Lawrence City Commission less than a month ago. In fact, Bosch-Hastings said the team’s day-to-day outreach work only just started on Monday. Right now, there’s a focus for the group on getting out into the community and connecting with people.

It may be premature to look for other large-scale outreach efforts in the immediate future; the pair said the plan for now is to keep refining the Homeless Response Team’s work before planning for any other big events.