Annual count provides snapshot of homelessness in Wichita as task force starts work

On a cold January morning, teams of volunteers were dispatched from the Open Doors headquarters on Second Street to count the number of homeless people living in the city and connect them with help.

The annual Point-in-Time count provides a snapshot of homelessness in the community and is used to determine how much federal funding the city will receive for homeless services next year.

“It’s both for the funding and it’s also for the outreach,” said Cole Schnieders, continuum of care planning manager with United Way of the Plains, which oversees the counting process.

The Thursday count comes a week after a task force of local leaders set a goal of ending homelessness in the community within three years.

Volunteers collecting data on unhoused people gave them bags with snacks, a reusable water bottle, an emergency blanket and inflatable pillow, hygiene products and hand warmers — “Stuff you’d want if you were unsheltered on a day like today when it’s really cold out,” Schnieders said.

They also shared information about resources, including HumanKind Ministries’ 24/7 emergency shelter, which accommodates men, women and families.

“One man I found and was able to count, he didn’t even know about the all-day shelter,” said Dominique Davis, a Salvation Army employee who has participated in the count for the last three years. “He was like, ‘Oh, when did that start?’ And so then he started packing up after we gave him some stuff and he started heading that way.”

Schnieders said the outreach helps catch people who have fallen through the cracks.

“There was a story last year of a veteran who was basically going through services and he was homeless, and then he disappeared on the VA but we found him during last year’s Point-in-Time count and then we were able to get him housed,” Schnieders said.

He said he expects this year’s numbers to be finalized in April ahead of May’s federal deadline. The 2022 Point-in-Time count found 619 unhoused people in Sedgwick County — almost all in Wichita. According to the city, people experiencing homelessness go without housing for an average of 71 days.

“I felt like it was important for me to get more of a first-hand experience as to what our housing and [Homeless Outreach Team] are working with,” said District 5 City Council member Bryan Frye, who started the count at 4:30 a.m. with other volunteers.

“It was about truly learning what’s going on and what people are experiencing, so it was eye-opening, sobering, but extremely informational.”

Until 2018, the Point-in-Time count was hosted at Century II, where volunteers give meals and provide haircuts and other services. Then Sedgwick County’s continuum of care made the switch to sending out volunteer teams.

“We were finding people that were in camps all over the city, and they either didn’t know or they didn’t want to go to a big event,” Schnieders said. “So we switched it so that we go out to them, wherever they’re camping, with some resources.”

Volunteers are sent to targeted locations identified in the month before the count by groups including the Wichita Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team and the Wichita Children’s Home as likely campsites. They interview people they find to get a better understanding of what support services they could benefit from.

“Questions like, ‘Do you experience severe and persistent mental illness?’ ‘Do you have a substance abuse disorder?’ Questions that just help us figure out, if we were to get them into housing, what level of case management would they need to stay in that housing?” Schnieders said.

Functional zero

Wichita’s Homelessness Taskforce held its kickoff meeting last week, bringing together a committee of elected officials and nonprofit leaders at the recommendation of the Mental Health and Substance Abuse Coalition.

At the meeting, task force members set a goal of reaching “functional zero” homelessness — a metric that indicates a community has measurably solved homelessness.

“We need to make some significant changes to the entire ecosystem in our community to try and hit those goals,” city Director of Housing and Community Services Sally Stang said.

“We don’t want people to be living in a shelter. And that’s the whole idea around functional zero. You’re never going to hit zero, I’m sorry. Every day, someone could end up going into homelessness. The idea of functional zero is that when someone enters into homelessness, they are quickly moved into housing.”

Schnieders said he doesn’t think three years is too ambitious a time frame for reaching functional zero.

“I think there’s a mix of resources that are untapped or are not combined in our community, so I’m very hopeful that that task force is going to do a good job uniting county, city, federal, private dollars into one mission of ending homelessness,” he said.

The task force will also oversee the administration of a $1 million Department of Justice grant aimed at reducing crime and addressing the homelessness problem in the Broadway corridor, between 10th and Kellogg and Waco to Washington.

Last month, the City Council voted to apply for a federal grant to support the construction of a facility combining a homeless shelter, affordable housing units and a social services hub. Officials acknowledged that the combined campus would likely cost at least five times the $5.5 million in grant money allocated through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOME-ARP program.

“The way we’ve proposed it at this point is, we wanted to do something that is that home run swing,” Stang said at the time.

The city will use a competitive bid process to seek out willing providers that could help operate the city-owned shelter and housing units.