Daily Herald opinion: The challenge of engagement: Communities’ consortium combines various resources to combat homelessness

As an issue confronting communities, combating homelessness is a unique challenge fraught with complexities. So, it demands complex solutions.

A newly organized, two-year group effort in the suburbs set to begin in January isn’t going to deliver a panacea to the towns involved. But, through a combination of public and private resources and direct personal contacts, it does embrace the problem with the kind of complexity required to help individuals living without housing as well as the communities they live in.

The Northwest Consortium on Homelessness is the product of months of discussions by social workers and government and private agencies seeking to coordinate and improve their efforts to reach out to homeless persons and help them find housing and services. The agency comprising as many as 10 suburban communities will employ a full-time case manager from the Connections for the Homeless organization in Evanston, to reach out to individuals directly and help them find housing or shelter, benefits, health services, employment and more.

Communities involved in the planning included governments in Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Des Plaines, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Palatine, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg and WheelingParticipating towns will provide village hall office space for the social worker, who also will provide training and assistance to municipal staff, and about a half dozen towns will evenly divide the $112,000 cost of the program.

Arlington Heights Village Manager Randy Recklaus said elements of the project grew out of discussions following a debate last year over a potential ban on sleeping or camping on public property in the community. The ban did not pass, but the issue led to discussions with social workers and police about the difficulties they confront, and that led to the effort to produce a cooperative response among agencies and governments.

“Being able to coordinate between communities, but also having that automatic connection between the not-for-profit sector and the municipal sector I think is really something that you’re not seeing, at least in the Northwest suburbs, in this way,” Recklaus told our Christopher Placek in a report in Tuesday’s Daily Herald.

Some of the greatest obstacles advocates face in trying to help homeless people is a lack of awareness about services available to them and how to seek them.

Darren Brown, the social worker for Arlington Heights who has led the homelessness consortium effort, told Placek, “Some of these barriers can be addressed meaningfully if someone’s spending the time and engaging with folks.”

The Northwest Consortium on Homelessness appears to offer a constructive opportunity to begin that engagement. We look forward to seeing it at work.