Homeless services are restored as Frank Williams center celebrates reopening in KCK

The people with the programs, donations and goodwill to reopen a Kansas City, Kan., center’s homeless services unfurled a yellow ribbon for cutting Tuesday morning.

One person who wasn’t at the ceremony for the Frank Williams Housing Resource Center was Frank Williams himself — a caseworker who died of an aneurysm in 2001 at age 32.

“But I know he’s here,” said his mother, Leona Williams, watching what she called a “blessed” moment as people celebrated.

The people who stepped forward with donations for the dropped homeless services were much like her son, Williams said.

Frank Williams was the kind of person “who would always give you his coat in the rain,” she said. “He was an inspiration to me to do the right thing.”

In this case the right thing to do, said the key donors, Peter and Veronica Mallouk and Charles Carney, representing the Catherine E. Carney Memorial Fund, was to help bring back the Frank Williams center’s services.

The donors had been moved, Peter Mallouk said, by the stories of the people who needed the center at 1201 N. Seventh St.

Catherine Carney had always supported services for people in need in Wichita, said her son, Charles. He knew well what the Frank Williams center meant to people in KCK because he worked to help find housing for people at the Wyandot Center for Community Behavioral Healthcare.

He believed his mother would have wanted to help the center and dedicated a portion of her memorial fund to it.

“This (Frank Williams) is an incredible support for people who are suffering.”

Wyandot Inc., which operates the center, announced in February that it was closing the drop-in services because of cuts in state funding to other programs under Wyandot. The drop-in services had no funding source and relied on revenue from other Wyandot programs.

Cutting the services meant people could not come inside the center to take showers or use its laundry facilities, computers, telephones, mail service and other amenities.

Ted Sharp, 49, who was watching the ceremony along with friend Shara Hodge, 36, said he knows many people will be relieved to see the services back. He said he has used them many times himself.

“When they closed it down, they shut it down on a lot of people that needed help,” he said. “It hurt a lot of people around here.”

The center kept track of its numbers, said Sherrie Watkins-Alvey, who is a director of housing and employment services for the Wyandot Center. The program had 845 registered users and averaged 96 visitors a day since August.

The news of the closing brought an outpouring of concern and people wanting to help, said Randy Callstrom, the president and CEO of Wyandot Inc., and he began to fall into a “spiel” with callers talking about the program’s financial needs.

But, Callstrom said, he’d barely gotten into it with one caller — Peter Mallouk, founder of the wealth management company Creative Planning Inc. — when Mallouk cut in, saying, “If I wrote you a check, how soon could you open?”

The answer, it turned out, was April 5.

The programs will be looking for more help to sustain them beyond 2017, seeking grants and other sources, the center announced. People wanting to help can call 913-328-4667.

This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 11:50 AM with the headline "Homeless services are restored as Frank Williams center celebrates reopening in KCK."