In shadow of popular tiny homes, an ambitious plan to serve veterans in Kansas City
A few years ago, Cheryl Frederick was living out of her car.
The U.S. Army veteran credits the Veterans Community Project in south Kansas City for helping her find housing and for aiding her efforts to navigate the maze that is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
“They’ve been my angels, my superheroes,” Frederick said on Wednesday. “I am thankful for this place.”
That place may soon be able to help more veterans. On Veterans Day, the Veterans Community Project, well known for its tiny home village, unveiled ambitious plans for a new campus expansion that would bring together various community services to help serve those who served.
“I’ve watched this progress and grow,” Frederick said. “It’s such a blessing. And we need these services. There’s a lot of people who are too afraid to ask.”
The organization hopes to raise $10 million to help build a new facility at its campus at 89th Street and Troost Avenue. Cofounder and CEO Bryan Meyer said some work, like demolishing the used car lot where the group plans to build, will start immediately. But much of the progress will depend on fundraising.
“It could be start to finish one year or it could be start to finish three years,” he said.
The new building would help the Veterans Community Project offer more services to veterans, whether it’s dental or vision care, mental health services or just help navigating the various levels of bureaucracy that can complicate veteran services. Meyer said he hopes the centralized hub will help combat the dual crises of veteran homelessness and veteran suicides.
“When somebody asks for help, you got one opportunity, maybe two if you’re lucky. So we have to be able to say yes on the spot,” he said. “This plan, this process will enable us to do more than we already do today.”
In many ways, the Veterans Community Project is already a one-stop-shop for veterans looking for support. But a larger space would allow the organization to house more private and public services under one roof.
“We already offer a lot of the services but the problem is we simply don’t have the room to put everybody in one place,” Meyer said. “And everybody’s calling for it. They’re saying, we need a centralized hub for us all to work together. So, everybody knows it’s the best way to do it.”
Meyer said the group has already received some significant donations, but more is needed to bring the idea to reality. He said visiting the organization’s website at veteranscommunityproject.org is the best way to give.
The organization’s tiny home village has been much celebrated for its efforts to bring veterans out of homelessness. It became a prominent stop on the campaign trail for politicians and was featured in the Netflix show, “Queer Eye.”
It has already started efforts to bring that concept to the Denver and St. Louis areas.
Much like that has become a national model for combating veteran homelessness, he said the Veterans Community Project’s expanded campus aims at setting a precedent for other organizations across the country looking to better serve veterans.
“We’re proving it here and then we’ll roll it out to other cities as well,” he said.
Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander said the expansion will further the group’s goal of saving veterans from falling through the cracks.
Kander fell just short of unseating Republican Sen. Roy Blunt in 2016 and was the odds-on favorite to be Kansas City’s next mayor before he abruptly dropped from public view in 2018 to focus on treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder associated with his service as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
He figured he could just show up at the VA and ask for help. But that experience showed him just how difficult it can be for veterans to receive the benefits they’ve earned.
“I went to the VA and I found that process was a lot more onerous than I expected,” said Kander, now the president of Veterans Community Project. “I’m a person with a phone full of influential contacts, a law degree, pretty high level government experience — I’m the former secretary of state of Missouri — and I found that process to be really difficult to navigate.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 5:09 PM.
