In day 2 of Douglas County budget hearings, agencies share their proposals for fighting chronic homelessness, addiction and more

Lawrence Journal World - Josie Heimsoth

Published July 9, 2024

A host of social service agencies — and, for the first time, a local church — are asking Douglas County for funding in 2025 to build new transitional housing and strengthen the support systems for people struggling with homelessness and substance abuse.

The Douglas County Commission on Tuesday, the second day of its 2025 budget hearings, heard funding requests from several social service agencies whose projects would support the community plan to end chronic homelessness, “A Place for Everyone.” As the Journal-World has reported, the plan’s goal is to achieve “functional zero” homelessness by 2028, meaning the number of people experiencing homelessness never exceeds the community’s capacity to move people into permanent housing.

Commissioners didn’t make any final decisions at Tuesday’s hearings, but Assistant County Administrator Jill Jolicoeur signaled that the county wanted to prioritize projects that address chronic homelessness. She said that historically, the county hasn’t always had the funding or supportive wraparound services that are needed to keep people housed. 

For two of the organizations that addressed the commission on Tuesday — the Cardinal Housing Network and Ninth Street Missionary Baptist Church — it was the first time they’d requested funds from the county. Both of them are looking for money to build more housing for people exiting difficult situations like drug addiction and homelessness.

Ninth Street Missionary Baptist Church is seeking $900,000 to collaborate with another local organization, Family Promise, to build six transitional housing units for Family Promise clients on property owned by the church. Family Promise would provide case management and other supportive services to the families served by those units. 

Cardinal Housing Network, meanwhile, might not sound as familiar in Lawrence as some other organizations requesting funds. It’s a new local nonprofit created to provide housing, supplemental care and educational programs to women recovering from substance abuse, and it is seeking $383,000 to create eight permanent supportive housing units for that population.

It wasn’t the only organization seeking funding for such a project. A longtime player in the Douglas County social services field, DCCCA, is requesting $800,000 to help pay for its $4.2 million recovery housing project for women with substance use disorders and their children.

Not all of the requests related to “A Place for Everyone” would build new housing. Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, for instance, wants $42,000 to help fund its Wellness Wednesdays program, which uses a mobile clinic to provide on-site services such as physical exams, immunizations and more at the Lawrence Community Shelter. The idea, as LDCPH Executive Director Jonathan Smith previously told the Journal-World, is to improve access to health care by meeting unhoused people in the community where they are.

“The whole reason we’re able to do the Wellness Wednesday initiative now is because of a community development block grant from the city, and we expect to spend all that probably by the middle point of next year,” Smith said on Tuesday. “And it’s been going really well, so it’s something we wanted to keep going.”

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