Clint Patty:
Well, hello there. Welcome to Investing in Good, a podcast that shines a spotlight on those making a profound impact within Northeast Kansas. This podcast is proudly presented by Clayton Wealth Partners, your partner in philanthropic financial planning for individual donors and investment management for endowments, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. In each episode, we’re going to sit down with the remarkable leaders and dedicated workers of nonprofits across the state of Kansas. We’re going to listen to their stories, learn about their causes, and talk about the challenges they have in making the lives of Kansans better each and every day. So stay tuned now as we delve into our next inspiring story on Investing in Good.
Welcome back to Investing in Good. I’m Clint Patty, the Managing Partner at Clayton Wealth Partners. I am very pleased today to have someone I wanted to have on the podcast for a long time. My good friend Brett Martin, the Vice President of Community Impact for United Way of Kaw Valley. Brett and I had been friends for at least 25 years. I think it was about 25 years ago that I was sitting in a church pew and Brett was in the pew ahead of me, and we’d see each other week after week and both had families and kids about the same age and been friends ever since. And Brett, thank you for appearing on the podcast today.
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. Happy to be here. And it’s funny that you used that title first Topeka Friend because when I talk with people about you and I talk about coming to Topeka so many years ago, I described you as my first Topeka friend, so we both carry that moniker.
Clint Patty:
That’s perfect. A good one to carry for sure. Brett’s here today to talk about the United Way, but before we get into that, as always, we like to get to know a little bit about our guests, and I know a little more about this guest than I do about many I’ve had. Let me just run through this resume here for a second and you tell me if I miss anything on it. You are and have been an ordained minister, a teacher, a historian, a Latin instructor, a mixologist, an executive. And when I describe you, I just say general raconteur, but tell me if I missed any of the last 25 years here.
Brett Martin:
That’s pretty close. That’s pretty close.
Clint Patty:
Tell me, just for those who may not know you in our audience, just tell us a little bit about Brett Martin and how you got to be the vice president of community impact for the United Way.
Brett Martin:
So thanks for that. I came to Topeka again about 25 years ago and had an opportunity to be able to teach. And so I started my teaching career here in Topeka and I’ve been teaching pretty much ever since. I taught at the Cair Paravel school for a number of years and served as Clint mentioned at First Christian Church as an associate pastor. Had some great opportunities there. I met a lot of great folks, worked with college students and young adults and got to know the Topeka community in that way. I had somewhat of a career change in my time there where I’ve lived in Central Topeka pretty much my entire time. And Central Topeka, for those of you who know Central, it is a unique area within our city. In many ways, it’s block by block.
You have some blocks that are full of homeowners, some blocks that are full of rentals. You have areas that have good infrastructure, are taken care of, and the next block not so much. And I have a lot of questions about that. I have a lot of questions about how our community got to this point. And so when the position at United Way came forward, I went through a really long interview process, but one of the things I mentioned is that if United Way was just about coloring in thermometers and raising money, not interested. But if United Way was really interested in long-term impact in the community, that’s what I was wanting to do.
And come to find out when I got there, they had been on that trajectory for a number of years and I started my work there and it’s just been a fantastic journey ever since.
Clint Patty:
Talk a little bit about where that, because you have always been a service-minded person, and I’m always curious where that comes from inside. Is it something you were raised with? Is it something that’s intuitive? What drives you to service?
Brett Martin:
So I would say that my family, my mom, God rest her soul, would kill me for saying this, but we certainly grew up lower middle class, if not sort of on that upper edge of poverty. And yet my parents modeled for me a service mindset in any number of different ways. I can remember my dad spending weekends going and doing carpentry work for folks and helping folks out throughout our small community in Fort Scott. Did a lot of work with my local church. When I was growing up, my mom was someone who really clawed herself out of poverty and was very much, if anyone is self-made, my mom certainly was.
She was someone who opened herself to help as well. So I really think my parents modeled that for me and actually nobody’s ever asked me that question, so it’s interesting to ponder and think through it. But I would say that they both very much modeled that mindset for me and instilled that in significant ways for both me and brother and probably set me on the trajectory that I’m on today.
Clint Patty:
That’s always interesting to me. I think that that becomes legacy, really. And I knew your mom, what a great lady. You and I have literally been through death and life together and the last 25 years, both of us lost our moms before we were really ready to by a long stretch and should have. I think both in many ways, we’ve learned so much from them. I mean, I know you feel this way too, I’m still learning. You think back to things and think, “Oh, that’s why she said that or did that.” That is legacy above all else. So all right.
Talk to us a little bit about the United Way of Kaw Valley. I think most people think of the United Way, and I’ll be honest, when you said coloring in the monitors immediately thought of that. You think of the yearly meeting that you have maybe at your place of work, but I don’t think a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking about the mission of the United Way and what it really does. So talk a little bit about that for our audience.
Brett Martin:
So the United Way of Kaw Valley, the United Ways really began over a hundred years ago as this united fundraising organization, as communities were dealing with the fact that multiple folks were coming in and asking for money at different places and United Way became that united fundraising organization and was like that for the majority of its life. But in recent decades has really focused on impact and on measuring impact in communities. So when we talk about who we are and what we do, we get to some of those core values. We talk about creating and cultivating an unbreakable network of support for a strong, healthy and equitable community.
So it’s not just about raising money, it’s not just about volunteer engagement, it’s not just about grant making, it’s not just about collaborating. It’s not just about corporate relationships and donor relationships. It’s really about this larger network of support that gets us to a place where we can look and say, “We are strong, we are healthy, and we’re equitable.” That’s what drives us both in terms of mission, but it’s also the vision we have for the larger community.
Clint Patty:
So that mission and vision, give us an example or two of programs or initiatives that show off or showcase that initiative.
Brett Martin:
So I’ll give you an example. Back in March of 2020, everybody can probably remember where they are when they first heard the word COVID-19.
Clint Patty:
Unfortunately yes.
Brett Martin:
Everybody can sort of remember those moments. We knew as an organization that something big was coming and that it was going to require change, but we had no idea what that looked like. So what we did is we pulled some of our key partners, we pulled YWCA of Northeast Kansas, we pulled Topeka Rescue Mission, pulled Topeka Community Foundation in on what was called a Zoom meeting at the time. We did not have a subscription, so we had that sort of free 45 minute window and we had some conversation and we said, “We think something’s coming. We’re not sure what it is, but we think we need to do something and we need to step into some space.” And so the last question that I asked of those partners is I said, “What do you need from us?” And they said, “This.” I said, “Okay, how often?”
They said, “Well, it probably can’t be monthly. Okay, what about weekly?” “That sounds good. When’s everybody free?” We kind of looked at our calendars and we met on a Tuesday at three o’clock. We said, “Tuesday at three o’clock works.” So that became the COVID-19 Response and Coordination meeting, been going on since March 17th, 2020. Convene hundreds of individuals across the community over that period of time. It goes to about 125 emails, anywhere from 35 to 50 show up every week. And we pulled the community together and really began to think about how we had to do our work differently. And COVID in that way, as difficult as it was, as tragic as it was, as disproportionately affected the most vulnerable were in our community. It galvanized us as a social services ecosystem.
It began to have us think about instead of having people come to us for services, sending services out to the community. So at that same time, Stormont Vail was thinking about how they could get services out to the community and came up with their mobile unit. At that same time, conversations began about how to serve those who were experiencing homelessness. And so the idea of MAP, the Mobile Access Partnership, which goes around to different churches in different areas in the community served well over 1500 unique individuals since its inception began. We began recognizing that people couldn’t come to us for food. So through the Farmers to Families program in the USDA and a partnership with Topeka Rescue Mission and a whole host of other folks, we did porch drops and delivered food during that time.
And we came together in ways that we hadn’t before. And one of the things I say at the beginning of those meetings again since March 17th, 2020 is when we come into this meeting, titles are left at the door, agency names are left at the door, and we place the community at the center of our work. I don’t say that as a phrase at the beginning because it’s the thing I say at the beginning of the meeting. It evolved. I recognize that people were doing that. And so I remind them when they come into that space, this is what we do because this is what you’ve done for months and years now. And so that’s one of the ways that we have been able to cultivate that unbreakable network of support.
People keep coming back and periodically I give them an out and I say, “Hey, is this meeting still worth your while? Should we still be meeting at three o’clock on Tuesdays?” And they say, “Absolutely.” And we talk about the big things in our community. We talk about housing, we talk about childcare, we talk about food security, we talk about substance use, and we talk about mental health. Those are the big five that have shown up in nearly every conversation in some way, shape or form. And they continue to drive our conversations. They continue to force us to think creatively about our work, about how we can partner together and how when we place the community at the center, it reorients our work and gets us away from thinking about what our priorities are and what the priorities are of the community.
Clint Patty:
So what started out as a weekly meeting as a response to COVID has evolved, hasn’t it?
Brett Martin:
It has evolved very much. And so when you think about the things that came out of this, the Farmers to Families program that Topeka Rescue Mission took on, sort of flourished.
Clint Patty:
Let’s stop with that. Tell me about that program.
Brett Martin:
So the Farmers Families Program was really precipitated during COVID when people began to learn in the spring of 2020 that people in the Salinas Valley in California were tilling under their lettuce fields because there was no place for the produce to go, no cruise ships, no convention centers, no school lunches. And so all of these places where this food was going, there was no market for it. And the USDA at the time was taking some heat. We have hungry people, why are we plowing under fields? So they came up with these Farmers to Families program where they bypassed some of the red tape in the food security industry. And they came to folks like Topeka Rescue Mission and some of their partners and said, “Hey, what if we get food directly to you through a shipping company and they bring the food to you? Can you get it to people?”
And the leaders at the mission at the time knew the partnerships we had in this community. They said absolutely. So they didn’t just serve people in Topeka, they served surrounding counties. And essentially the way it worked was we had leaders within the community who knew who their hungry neighbors were, and they would come to the mission and they would load up boxes of food on trailers, and then they would take them to central points and neighborhoods and people would come get those boxes of food and then they would do porch drops. And the amount of boxes people got depended upon how many people were in the household. And so we did that in our College Hill neighborhood for example, but neighborhoods throughout the city of Topeka and ultimately surrounding counties.
You had folks from some rural counties as well who were coming down of that one day a week getting that food and then distributing it to families. It was significant. It was a remarkable achievement. And a real testament to the volunteer leadership that we have in this community when people are posed with an opportunity and the crisis, they really did respond in amazing ways.
Clint Patty:
That sounds like… And that program is still going on.
Brett Martin:
So ended when things kind of came back to normal, but the program itself ended, the relationships did not. So we continue to lean into those relationships. TRM and other partners lean into those volunteers who created those networks of support. And we continue to think of ways of how to leverage those relationships and how to be able to get to populations of focus that we can’t always get to, but the people in those neighborhoods can. And it’s been remarkable to see what’s come out of those relationships as well.
Clint Patty:
So in my business, we measure success with numbers and data and benchmarks, and it’s an endless stream of statistics to look at. With an organization like the United Way, how do you measure success? Do you have metrics that you go by? How do you week to week, year to year, look and say, “We either had a successful year or we had a challenging year?”
Brett Martin:
It’s a great question. So the other thing I’m doing right now is I’m teaching non-profit management leadership at Washburn University as part of the political science department. I’m teaching my students and we’re talking about this very issue right now. It’s very timely for me right now. We’re talking about essentially the three sector economy and how we were a two sector economy for a very long time. You had the private sector, you had government. They were neat and they were tidy. Over a period of time, government began to have issues that they could not address. So you have the rise of the non-profit sector, but then government and private corporations gave dollars to to be able to deal with social issues, for example, which is what we’re in the business of.
But because it’s so young, there’s a real difficulty in trying to understand what success looks like. In government, they have their own metrics. In your industry, you have your own metrics. If you’re in a nonprofit world and the driver and goal isn’t profit, what is it? Well, you can say it’s impact, but in the nonprofit sector, because it’s so diverse, impact looks like a lot of different things.
Clint Patty:
It’s tough to objectively measure the term impact.
Brett Martin:
It is because when we talk about impact at United Way, we’re using the same term, but we mean other things. When the board at Topeka Civic Theater is looking at impact and success, they’re using the same word, but they mean much different things. Same for Arts Connect, same for Kansas Children’s Discovery Center. But in our world, and again, this is timely because this month I’ll present my annual report to the board of directors the last Thursday of this month here in September, and I will talk with them about what successes our partners have had with donor dollars. Things like how many children reached their benchmarks on their way to kindergarten? What percent was that? How many students went through financial literacy simulations and programs and demonstrated success, qualitative and quantitative?
How many individuals were moved from unemployment to employment? How many were moved from lower employment to higher wage? Maybe even household sustaining wage. How many individuals were given supports in school so that they could reduce absenteeism, increase time in the classroom and get resources for their family to help stabilize? Those are the kinds of things that we look at when we measure impact. That’s on my side. When Angel, my colleague and the vice president of resource development looks at it, he’s looking at his metrics related to fundraising, related to donors. Donors kept, new donors, diverse revenue streams, corporations engaged, businesses, how much businesses gave, and he’s looking at that piece.
My colleague Jess in strategic initiatives and volunteer engagement looks at how many volunteers we engaged. How many dollars that leveraged in the community, how many initiatives we were able to support across the community. That doesn’t even get to the other things related to that unbreakable network of support, like how many collaborations did we lead? How many opportunities did we create as an organization because we brought people together to problem solve that we don’t measure in part because we don’t have a lot of capacity, but also just because it’s part of what we do and we don’t necessarily have metrics related to it. So that’s a long answer to your question.
Clint Patty:
Well, it’s complicated.
Brett Martin:
It is complicated.
Clint Patty:
It’s hard because you talked about Angel. With those who don’t know Angel Romero.
Brett Martin:
The one person out there who’s listening who doesn’t know Angel Romero.
Clint Patty:
There wouldn’t be very many people in this county, but certainly his ability to measure is more what you think of on the corporate side. It’s pure numbers, and you’re able to look at that. Measuring social impact is quite different. So we had a podcast with Kim Poulsen in Lawrence who does-
Brett Martin:
Fantastic.
Clint Patty:
Yes, terrific. And her measure is obviously the ability to make available childcare for more people, which is a tremendous challenge in Douglas County. It’s a tremendous challenge here. It is hard for people to break a cycle of poverty if they can’t go to work because they’ve got childcare issues. I mean, that is a real issue for people, the availability of quality childcare. So that can be measured, but it’s harder, isn’t it?
Brett Martin:
It is, but you can also measure it at different levels on the spectrum. So one of the great things Kim’s doing at the Community Children’s Center is she’s providing supports through partnerships to those families who are bringing their children so that they can maintain childcare and also maintain all of those other challenges that they have as essentially the working poor in Lawrence and Douglas County. But when you measure that, you can certainly measure number of available childcare slots and then you can measure the success of kids. But then there are other things that you can measure like how many people did we keep in the workforce that wouldn’t have stayed in the workforce if we hadn’t had this?
How many dollars did we increase in the local economy because they had money to spend, because they were employed, because they had childcare? And when you start connecting all of these dots, it becomes pretty complex when you recognize the ripple effects. It starts with childcare, but it affects employment, it affects the local economy, it affects the local social safety net. If those folks are working and have child care, it means they’re accessing emergency services less, which means there are more resources for those who don’t have those opportunities. And we know that the stress on the social safety net for rent, utility assistance, for food, for healthcare and prescription assistance, it is an incredible stress.
So the more people we can move to sustainability, the less stress on that system and the more we have to be able to move more people to that level of stability. So there’s all kinds of things that something like child care touches, and that’s why… That’s what’s amazing about Kim and her vision and the Community Children’s center because they’re not just thinking about child care, right?
Clint Patty:
Well, you can’t, if you’re going to raise donor dollars and you’re going to ask governments to issue grant money, you’ve got to show how those dollars are being spent and what value selfishly goes back to the community. And that’s one example of a big one that without it, employers are losing good employees. Governments are having, as you said, stress on the social safety net. If you could show the reduction in those, it gets a lot easier to get those donor dollars, doesn’t it?
Brett Martin:
It does. And if you turn the other direction, so these programs and folks like United Way, we really stand between two significant constituencies. We stand between our funders, which are diverse donors, government, foundations and others. And we stand between the community we serve. If we turn around from the donors and look at the community we serve, Kim would also say, and we would say, “We can’t just focus on child care.” Because that’s one thing that this family presents with and while our immediate need that we’re meeting is child care, these families come in with a whole host of other issues.
And while they’re here, if we can capture them in this moment and provide other resources to them and make it more efficient for them to access resources so that they don’t have to go to four other places, all the better for their stability, mental health, stress in the home, et cetera.
Clint Patty:
So for folks that might be interested in either volunteering with the United Way, I assume there’s a pretty extensive volunteer network there and/or giving to the United Way. We’re going to plug this a couple of times through this podcast. What’s the best way to get ahold of you?
Brett Martin:
Uwkawvalley.org and we’ve got Give, we’ve got Advocate, we’ve got Volunteer, you click on Give. There’s all kinds of opportunities for you to be able to give. When you click on volunteer, you’re immediately directed through another click to topekavolunteers.org, which is our platform that we pay for that’s free to the community. That you can sign up for with very little information. And that connects you with all of those interests, causes, passions that you might have in the community to be able to feed that part of yourself, that real felt need that we all have to be able to help. And so those are just a couple of ways that folks are able to do that. If you’re part of a workplace who doesn’t have a workplace campaign, getting ready to kick off workplace campaign season right now.
It’s a great opportunity to have some conversation with HR to be able to reach out to me, to be able to reach out to Angel. All of our contact information is on the website to be able to have your company do a workplace campaign, for example. Otherwise, you can give as an individual through the website, you can either set that up where it comes out monthly or you can do those as one time gifts.
Clint Patty:
United Way of Kaw Valley. Now it wasn’t always United Way of Kaw Valley. So talk about, for those that don’t know fairly recently, right? There’s been a merger with the United Way of Lawrence, so talk about that merger and how that’s gone.
Brett Martin:
So we recognize that we are connected in networks with our geographic neighbors and conversations began a few years ago at the board level between United Way of Douglas County and United Way of Greater Topeka about what it might be like if we merged. And so over a period of time those conversations evolved. They began to include staff and exec staff and then later our larger staff. We had a transition team that did a fantastic job in getting us to that place. It’s not easy to merge organizations. Lawrence and Douglas County, while they are our adjacent neighbor, they’re different. Shawnee County and Topeka are different. Jackson County that we serve is different. Jefferson County that we serve is different.
So we had to figure out how we came together as one regional organization and we’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We had some conversations with some of our partners in the banking industry that went through a merger and they went through a merger several years ago. And some of them will still say, “We’re still merging.” And we very much feel like we are still merging and we’ll continue to merge as we develop more policies, more practices, but also as we create a culture that we are a regional organization that serves Shawnee, Jefferson, Jackson, and Douglas Counties in northeast Kansas.
And that we are committed to our communities in the unique ways and needs that they have with the unique strengths and assets that they have, keeping the donor dollars where donors want them to be and continuing to bring our partners together and do the work that we need to do to create that unbreakable network of support.
Clint Patty:
My experience just tells me that when you have good people that are dedicated to a good cause, it will work itself out. Sometimes in ways you don’t always think it will, but it will work itself out. You also have a podcast. I want to make sure you get a chance to plug. Our Community, Our Mission. Talk about that.
Brett Martin:
Our Community, Our Mission is a podcast through Topeka Rescue Mission, and I’ve had an opportunity to be able to be a part of that podcast a few times now. Really great opportunity to be able to partner with our colleagues, our co-local champions in the community who are working with those who are experiencing homelessness. And Our Community, Our Mission is the Topeka Rescue Mission podcast. If you want some information about some things that are emerging in this community, episode 237, it’s one of the most recent ones. You can check that out because there are some things afoot in this community that are really timely. I think when I mentioned earlier that COVID galvanized our community, I think it also stripped bare some of those realities that we don’t want to talk about in our community.
And we saw some of the real difficulties that folks were experiencing. And since COVID, we’ve seen some increases in some of those inequities, and yet we’ve positioned ourselves to collaborate. So there’s an opportunity to take that spirit and practice of collaboration and apply it, for example, to those who are experiencing homelessness.
Clint Patty:
Let’s drill a little deeper into that homelessness issue because it’s captured headlines all over the country. The best estimates we have in the United States is there’s about 650,000 people at any one time experiencing homelessness. Of that, about 112,000 of those are children. And it’s interesting when you look at the areas of the country that have the highest number of homeless, some of it’s the places you would expect, the places where housing is quite expensive and in some cases unreachable.
So New York, Oregon, California all appear on it. But interestingly enough, I think the state with the fourth-highest level of homelessness is Vermont. And I think Vermont might be the most rural state in the entire country. Can you speak to that urban versus rural and how homelessness cuts across all of that?
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. I’ll tell you a quick story about that, by the way, in terms of rural areas, because we often don’t think about rural areas experiencing homelessness. I was in my hometown of Fort Scott, Southeast Kansas, Bourbon County, a number of months ago. I was taking a walk with my brother and sister-in-law, walked from their house and we walked through downtown and we’re walking down Main Street, we’re talking and I start to lag behind and pretty soon I just stop. My brother and sister-in-law keep going. They keep talking as if I’m there and I turn and I look at a gazebo that I’ve walked by several times in our community and there is a woman camping and my brother turns around and he goes, “What are you doing? Come on.”
So I jog and I catch up with him and I say, “You have somebody camping downtown.” He goes, “Yeah, we have several people.” I knew that intellectually. I didn’t understand that my small town that I grew up in rural Southeast Kansas had individuals who were experiencing homelessness. So it happens everywhere. We’re having conversations right now, some of the folks I’m working with in Houghton, Jackson County, which Jackson County looks a lot like Bourbon, where I’m from in terms of population-wise. But interestingly enough, they’ve got individuals, for example, who are working at local businesses and they can’t find housing and they’re sleeping in their car and they’re coming to work. So that gets to the point. Homelessness is essentially a housing issue.
There’s a guy named Gregg Colburn, wrote a book entitled Homelessness is a Housing Problem. It’s a great book. He’s a professor in Seattle. And he and a data guy started looking at homelessness from a systems issue. We often look at it from an individual issue. So we look at individual factors, substance use, poverty, mental health, other types of things, unemployment, all of which exist.
Clint Patty:
To a large extent.
Brett Martin:
And all of which can be reasons that folks become unsheltered. But at the systems level, what they found through their research was that it’s ultimately the lack of affordable housing in communities that’s the systems issue. So for example, they looked at communities that have high levels of poverty, high levels of substance use, high levels of folks with severe and persistent mental illness, and there can be two different cities. San Francisco for example, and Detroit. Detroit has significantly lower populations of those experiencing homelessness. San Francisco has higher, or you can compare it to DC if you want to go in terms of closer geography.
But what’s different is the housing market and the affordability of housing in Detroit, much different from San Francisco, LA or DC or New York. And so they’re looking at it from this systems issue. It doesn’t deny the individual factors, but when you look at things apples to apples, you can have communities with high levels of severe and persistent mental illness here and high levels of severe and persistent mental illness here and have drastically different populations who are experiencing homelessness.
Clint Patty:
I mean, just for me, looking at it in my simple-minded way, as a former practicing attorney, I knew plenty of people that have problems with substance abuse. They all have houses.
Brett Martin:
Absolutely right.
Clint Patty:
So what do you do? I mean, what systematic… I mean, this is a problem obviously that the entire country is grappling with. So there’s a big conference that’s coming up here in Seattle. That people here from Topeka are going to be going to from the partnership. And that’s one of the number one things. And I think Seattle is reaching out to the country going, “We want to talk about this because we drowning here and we need to figure out.” Because it has a greater impact on… It’s not just impacting those who are unsheltered.
It’s impacting local businesses. It’s putting stress on the local safety net. You’ve got police and first responders that are working overtime because they’re not going to deny services. So what do you change systematically? I assume if there was a solution out there, we talked about this earlier. It’s not like curing polio. We knew what the solution was there. This is much more complicated. There are many more issues, but what are some of the systematic changes that you all are looking at when you tackle this issue?
Brett Martin:
A couple of things to say before that. One is this idea of scale. Fewer than 5% of the total population in the United States are experiencing chronic homelessness. The difference is that as it has increased and shelters have had fewer beds, they’re more visible. They’re more visible.
Clint Patty:
Makes sense.
Brett Martin:
So for the longest time here in Topeka, we had a population and it was really the “problem” of Topeka Rescue Mission because they were housing and equipping and doing education and connecting to resources. The majority of those who were experiencing chronic homelessness have severe and persistent mental illness and were experiencing a lack of shelter for six months or more, for example, would be sort of part of that definition. But as it became more visible, as those numbers grew, it becomes a very human issue for individuals because we as human beings, when we see something like that, it has an effect on us and it causes us to feel and think things that sometimes we don’t want to think and feel.
So what we want is we want it out of our purview.
Clint Patty:
We don’t want to see it.
Brett Martin:
We want to ship them out. We want to ship them to another community. We want to put them on the edge of town. And of course, we know what happens in the United States when we put people in “ghettos.” When we put people in situations where it’s a homogenous community that’s under resourced, we have lots of history of what happens there. The first-
Clint Patty:
Tragedy results, I mean, we have recent examples in this community of that. I mean, it’s things that are unspeakable and sad. That’s the only way I can think to describe it.
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. And so the first thing I want to say is scales. Well under 5% of the total population is experiencing homelessness in Topeka with our point and time count plus some other numbers. Experts in the community say we’re probably around 800. There’s 177 people or 177,000 people in Shawnee County. So we’re talking about fewer than a thousand. So that’s a significantly lower percentage when we think about it. However, of that roughly 800, we’ve got about 1% of that 800 or so, whatever, how we round that number out, who are the most visible and who have more of what we might call antisocial behaviors. And they are the individuals that you might see in downtown, for example. They’re a very small fraction of a percentage in the county, but they’re visible.
Clint Patty:
Very visible. You hear business owners steer downtown. We talk about the same eight to 12 people that we see.
Brett Martin:
Precisely. And so when you’re talking about eight to 12 people in a county of 177,000, I at least want the listeners to understand scale here. That said, it does not, and I do not ever want to minimize the difficulty that local businesses have when they have that type of disruption. And I will also say this, those who are working with those who are experiencing homelessness are 100% pro-local business. They want to see businesses thrive. They want to see businesses who are not having to deal with issues like this. And so many of them have reached out and want to be partners and want to do this type of work. I work downtown every Sunday morning. I work downtown on Iron Rail. So I am a downtown business employee, and so I see things myself and I recognize that, but I want to make sure we understand that scale.
That said, what do we do? Well, what do we do? So we have developed, imagined an intervention here in Topeka and Shawnee County called All Hands On Deck. It’s coming out of an organization called Compassion Strategies, which is led by Barry Feaker. Barry Feaker is a name that many people know. He led Topeka Rescue Mission for 36 years. Barry does a lot of consulting related to homelessness, and he’s doing a lot of work in Lawrence right now, for example, is doing work with other communities. And the framework for All Hands On Deck is a multi-sector coalition of around 200 people when it’s all fleshed out with different levels of commitment and engagement with the community that are committed to ending chronic homelessness in Topeka and Shawnee County by 2030.
Clint Patty:
Pretty ambitious timeline.
Brett Martin:
Audacious. And there are definitions for chronic homelessness that sort of we’re going to be talking about and sort of what that looks like. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to see people anymore, but it means that those people who want housing have access to housing and have the supports that they need to be able to be sheltered. And so that’s the plan through a multi-sector coalition that’s really looking at three things that are key that both came out of the recent homeless innovation consultants plan that the city set forth a number of months ago, but also that had been around for a little while. One is the development of a low barrier shelter. Topeka Rescue Mission is not a low barrier shelter. That’s not what they’re set up to be.
Clint Patty:
When you say low barrier shelter, what does that mean?
Brett Martin:
So what we’re talking about is we’re talking about one that doesn’t have a lot of rules, doesn’t have a lot of regulations. It’s absolutely safe. Folks can come in, for example, if they are intoxicated, but there are certain rules that apply there. There’s not programming tied to it necessarily, but it is a place where people can come in for the night and be able to find shelter, to be able to be safe and to be able to come in and out of in a different way than they would someplace like Lawrence Community Shelter in Lawrence or Topeka Rescue Mission, which has programs that supports those types of things. So that’s the idea of a low barrier shelter. And Topeka JUMP has been working really hard on that in the community. They’ve been advocating strongly for that.
They hope to have a site visit to a community in Minnesota where there’s a model that they want to take a look at for what a low barrier shelter looks like. They’ve got commitment from some elected officials here in town. And so there’s certainly lots of movement behind that and there’s lots of congregations that are a part of Topeka JUMP that are pushing for this. The second piece would be a one-stop shop homeless resource center. This is a place that looks a lot like what Impact Avenues is. If people are not familiar with Impact Avenues, impact Avenues is a model that comes out of Kansas City through Avenues of Life in Wyandotte County, which is focused on student homelessness and reducing and eliminating student homelessness.
So families with school aged children come into the Impact Avenues system when they’re ready and they are connected to resources in kind of a one-stop shop, right now they’re at Garfield Community Center and they’re there. When a family comes in, they have a navigator that helps them navigate all of those resources that they need, which are spread out across the community, but they come to one place and they’re able to get connected with all of those and move them from being unsheltered or couchsurfing or doubling up to being housed. And then the support continues with that family. So the idea of a one-stop shop is that the focus would just be on students. The focus would then be on individuals, families, the broader population.
And you would take MAP, that I talked about earlier, the Mobile Access Partnership, which moves around to different areas. And MAP and a one-stop shop would merge and would become this place where people would come to access all of those resources, which by the way, for many folks is a significant barrier. Barriers to getting IDs, barriers to getting connected with social services again, because you’ve got to go to so many places. When you co-locate those, you eliminate those barriers. There are other transportation barriers like how are people going to get to the one-stop shop? And that’s something we’re going to have to take a look at. But that’s the second piece. And the third piece is a permanent tiny home village that has affordable, accessible housing for individuals that could either be a transition to housing or could be permanent for some of them.
And so there’s conversations that looking at examples like Eden Village in Kansas City and other models to try to figure out how to get to this place where we’ve got a permanent tiny home village. Those were the three recommendations from the consultant who was hired by the city to take a look at this. And the Homeless Innovation Team worked for an 18-month period and came up with these. Some of these ideas already existed before that. But I think what was really valuable was how the consultant brought the partners and the community through a process to be able to arrive there together. And so then in May of this year, that presentation was given to city council and city council had some questions about that. And then there was a waiting period.
And recently at a city council meeting, city council was presented with something called Built for Zero. Built for Zero is a national model that essentially began in New Jersey but takes communities through a series of resources, best practices to what’s called functional zero, which essentially means we have more people going out of homelessness than are coming in. And that’s the idea. They like that model. They did some of that model through a program the city does called Equity Access Shelter, EAS, which gets housing assistance to individuals. That’s one part of it. This is a much larger, broader piece. And the beauty of this is that Built for Zero and All Hands On Deck, they work together hand in glove.
Many of the things that All Hands On Deck dovetail very well with the national best practice model of Built For Zero, which Kansas is moving to become a Built for Zero state through partnerships with the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services, KDADS, for example, is looking for Kansas to become a Built for Zero state and get access to those resources.
Clint Patty:
So this would be something then for, this three-part approach, something that the community will be looking to the city to lead.
Brett Martin:
So one of the big recommendations that came out of the Homeless Innovation team was the community said, “We do not want this to be government-led, not city, not county.” So the fourth recommendation was there needs to be a multi-sector collaboration that leaves this effort. That’s All Hands On Deck. That’s the multi-sector coalition. That by the way, has been around really in conversations before the Homeless Innovation team, but we put a pause on it because we wanted the Homeless Innovation team to be able to do their work. We didn’t want competition, we wanted to see how they came out. They came out in a very similar way that we were moving and then the Built for Zero thing.
It’s one of those pieces where we have some synergy between what the consultant told us, between All Hands On Deck, between the movement for Built for Zero, between the collaborations and partnerships and trusts that’s been built in the local social services sector since COVID. All of those things coming together position us as a community to be able to look at this issue of homelessness and this population and really strategically address it in a way that I’m not sure we’ve been able to before.
Clint Patty:
So how does All Hands On Deck move from these three recommendations? How do you get to the decisions of how to build and how to pay for a low barrier shelter, a one-stop shop and a permanent tiny home village? To me, that’s where the rubber is going to meet the road. How does that happen? What’s the next step?
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. So All Hands On Deck is right at the edge of launch. So I serve as the chair of All Hands On Deck and I have with me a strategic development team that’s cross sector. It’s folks from the faith community, from the business community, from the government community, from a whole host of other areas. And they are helping guide this work. So there will be ideas that come from leadership that will be vetted by the strategic development team that will then go down to all of those sectors I mentioned. There are 16 identified sectors so far. I think we’re going to have at least 20 with 10 people represented in each of those. So that’s where I’m getting to that more than 200 people.
And what we will do is we will be having conversations with those sectors and those sectors as we float ideas will have a continuous communication loop where their feedback from their sectors will come back to us and we will take that information and help prioritize low barrier shelter, one stop shop and permanent tiny home village. And then leverage their relationships, funding and otherwise to be able to move forward on these pieces. But this whole thing has to be sustainable, and that’s where a lot of the pre-work has been in positioning and having conversations with folks at the beginning. There’re going to be significant dollars needed to start this up, but there’s also going to be dollars that we’re going to need to sustain this.
And just to give you a sense of what it’s already costing us. So national estimates tell us that for an individual who is experiencing homelessness, the cost of the local community is in excess of $30,000 a year.
Clint Patty:
I believe that.
Brett Martin:
So when you think about that, we are already spending that money, we’re spending that money through law enforcement, through the court system, through the hospitals and ED visits, through cleanup, through a whole host of things. That’s the financial cost, but I alluded to it earlier, there’s also a human cost and a moral cost to the community when we don’t act. And that’s that feeling that people have when they come downtown and they see someone and they get uncomfortable. That’s the moral, that’s the spiritual, that’s the conflict that people are experiencing. That’s the cost that they are encumbering. If we talk about those who are aging, which is the oldest, excuse me, which is the fastest growing group among those who are being unsheltered.
That amount goes from right around 30,000 to over $100,000 a year. And that nationally is this population over 65 who are being priced out of their homes, and those stories are incredibly tragic. Then we have those folks who are at Shawnee County Correctional Facility who don’t have an address and there’s maybe a hundred plus of those costs $110 a night to stay at Shawnee County Correctional facility. If you have severe and persistent mental illness that goes up to $400 a night. We’re already paying for this and we’re paying for it not to stay the same because our numbers are going up. So what we’re paying right now as a community is not even holding steady because our point in time count numbers are going up, so there’s already a cost we’re encumbering.
So the challenge of All Hands On Deck and the challenge of this multi-sector coalition is to be able to talk to the larger community and to stakeholders to be able to humanize this and then to be able to say, “This is what we’re already paying. What would it look like if we paid and we’re actually doing rehousing and prevention services and wraparound services for individuals, and we saw that point in time count go down?”
Clint Patty:
Rather than pay for the price of failure, maybe the price of success would be a little better.
Brett Martin:
And you’re in the world of investments, so you understand. So right now our return is more people experiencing homelessness. That’s what we’re getting right now for what we’re paying. If Clayton Wealth Partners, if you were looking at your clients and they were looking at the return on their investment and the return on their investment was negative, I wouldn’t be in business very long.
Clint Patty:
They tend to be unhappy when that occurs.
Brett Martin:
They absolutely do. And you have a brilliant team here and great relationships and all of those things where you’re ensuring that that doesn’t happen. In the nonprofit sector, again, we are in a position where we are trying to tackle an issue like this, we need the partnership of the other two sectors, government and private sector to come alongside us because this is not just multi-sector in terms of our coalition, this is multi-sector in terms of the economy. Government, private and nonprofit and faith coming together to be able to address this issue that we’re all feeling the effects of financially.
We’re all feeling it intellectually, morally, and we have to figure out how to move forward as a community so that the return on our investment is not negative.
Clint Patty:
You sound just like the right kind of person to be the chair of All Hands On Deck.
Brett Martin:
That’s what I’m hearing.
Clint Patty:
What an excellent summary. Well, I wish you and the group luck. For folks that may want to get involved in this or involved in the United Way in general, again, let’s go ahead and plug that website.
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. So uwkawvalley.org is our website, and there are opportunities to be able to give, there are opportunities to be able to volunteer. As All Hands On Deck begins to emerge, you’re going to be seeing that more in the community and there will certainly be opportunities for folks to be able to give and to be a part of some of those sectors there as well.
The beauty of this movement and the beauty of where we are right now is that as unhappy as people are, they’re starting to see this as a community issue, as one that we all own and we all have a part of. And it’s up to us in this sector to find space for those individuals to be able to serve, to be able to give, to be able to do something that they feel like is helping the situation. And that’s what’s going to make All Hands On Deck ultimately successful and get us to that end of chronic homelessness by the end of 2030.
Clint Patty:
Brett Martin, well said. Brett Martin is the Vice President of Community Impact for United Way. Brett, anything else today you want to talk about that’s coming up for the United Way?
Brett Martin:
So we’re in campaign season, and so our teams and our campaign ambassadors are out there working with local companies. I would just say again, if you are part of a company who is not running a workplace campaign and you want to be a part of that, you want to be a part of this collective work of creating this unbreakable network of support for a strong, healthy and equitable community, you can certainly reach out to us through our website. We’ve got a campaign toolkit, we’ve got campaign ambassadors. We’ve just got a great team who’s able to be a part of that. If you’re someone who’s wanting to volunteer, if you have that service mindset and you’re not sure where to start, click on volunteer on our website. It’ll take you to TopekaVolunteers.org.
There’s so many opportunities for folks to be able to give back to their community in that way. When you’re doing that, you’re creating change, but you’re also increasing the capacity of our nonprofits, which is just fantastic. If you’re someone who’s interested in serving on a board, we have board leadership training, that’s another great opportunity. And so I would just say check out the opportunities on the website. Folks can also reach out to me. Bmartin@uwkawhvalley.org. Folks can always reach out to me and I can connect them with folks. There’s a lot of great work happening at United Way and it’s being driven by the individuals in our community, and if you want to be a part of that community, we’ve got space at the table.
Clint Patty:
Brett Martin, the Vice President of Community Impact for United Way of Kaw Valley. My friend, I have waited a long time to do this with you. It was worth it. The discussion on the homelessness issue alone I think is going to be enlightening and informative for people and for folks that didn’t know about the efforts of All Hands On Deck. They certainly do now and will want to know more about that going forward. So I thank you, my friend, and look forward to doing this again at some point.
Brett Martin:
Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity.
Clint Patty:
Thank you, Brett. You’ve been listening to another episode of Investing in Good. Today’s episode was brought to you by Clayton Wealth Partners. If you’re an individual seeking to increase your impact through thoughtful charitable giving, or if you represent an endowment, a foundation, or a nonprofit that’s looking to safeguard and grow your financial assets, please consider partnering with Clayton Wealth Partners. You can visit us at ClaytonWealthPartners.com and discover how we can help guide and empower you in your mission to make a difference.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this year, 2024, marks 40 years that Clayton Wealth Partners has been in business. We would love to extend a very special thank you to our clients nationwide. In particular, a thank you to all of Northeast Kansas. We often say that we are here for you. For the last 40 years, we are very thankful that you all have been here for us. On behalf of Clayton Wealth Partners, I’m Clint Patty. I thank you for listening. We will see you soon.