KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City is taking one of the first steps in a much larger effort to end homelessness in the city on Oct. 31.

The Impactful Street Outreach Training for city staff and outside organizations who try to help the homeless population is trying to coordinate similar efforts around the city.

“In Kansas City, we have a lot of disparate outreach groups that do different things,” Kansas City Houseless Outreach Coordinator Josh Henges said. “What we want to do is convene a group of folks who are providing outreach because we want to set a communal standard for what outreach is.”

Right now, he says there isn’t much coordination between groups that interact with the homeless population to give them goods and the groups that try to connect them to services that could help them.

Better connections between those groups, coupled with better data collection, would help city officials and local groups have a better idea of how many people need help, what they need and where they are so that help can best be delivered.

“This is the beginning phase of getting everyone together so we can do this better, so we can actually solve homelessness,” Henges said.

“We don’t want to make homelessness comfortable. There is no comfortable homelessness. We want to end homelessness, that’s our hope.”

You can find more information from the city of Kansas City about its homelessness efforts here.

You can find more information about the Greater Kansas City Coalition to End Homelessness here.