By: Loren Amelunke
The number of single women living on the streets has increased in Wichita over the past few years, according to Officer Brittney Graham from the Wichita Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team.
“It seems like every camp that we’re dealing with has a female at the camp,” Officer Graham said.
Annual point-in-time count estimates compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from Wichita and Sedgwick County seem to reflect this trend. The 2024 census counted 215 homeless women, which was 31% of the total homeless people found, compared to the 165 homeless women, approximately 27% of the total, who were recorded in 2020.
Graham said that the shelter at Humankind Ministries can accept single women and when the HOT Team calls, Humankind does its best to make room in its co-ed, low-barrier shelter.
Homeless service providers in the city, such as Humankind and United Methodist Open Door, report concerns about a woman’s safety outside of a shelter to the HOT team, who can try to track her down for a wellness check.
In a recent interview for another story, Josh Watkins, the homeless services director at Open Door, reported an incident he witnessed directly outside of the shelter to the HOT team. A man yelled at a woman that they were leaving, and she appeared to submissively pick up his bags and follow him.
“Hopefully it’s not for nefarious reasons, but sometimes we don’t see some of them (homeless women) for long periods of time, and I don’t know if that’s because they’re being trafficked or — you just don’t know,” he said.
Watkins said he can’t imagine being a homeless woman outnumbered by homeless men.
“I know people from working here that have a violent history against women,” Watkins said, referring to arrest records of homeless men he saw.
Wichita community members step in
A new women-only shelter, The Empowerment Center, was set to open in January — but it didn’t due to lack of funding.
The effort was funded by the Bibleway Community of Faith church.
Bibleway’s goal for The Empowerment Center is to provide programs that will help move women out of their crisis situation and into independent living. They want to be able to offer women opportunities for education and employment too.
“We knew we couldn’t sustain that kind of traffic over a long period of time without having sustaining resources to provide those services,” said Bishop Jeffrey Enlow, who serves as a pastor at Bibleway.
He said the center was originally going to be co-ed.
“But when we dug into and listened to people in the community, we discovered that the need was for women. I mean, there are several facilities for families, several facilities for men and women for domestic violence, but none for women only.” Enlow said.
Even though The Empowerment Center isn’t functioning, it’s still receiving calls from women in need of help. Enlow said the calls are innumerable.
Amanda Meyers, the executive director of the Wichita Family Crisis Center, said they receive lots of calls too.
The Wichita Family Crisis Center has to redirect those calls to other services because it is not a homeless shelter. It’s a shelter for women escaping domestic violence and sex trafficking.
“We probably — anecdotally — turn away at least three or four requests a day for shelter from people fleeing homelessness,” she said.
Even if the crisis center had the resources to take in anyone experiencing homelessness, Meyers said it’s already full and it’s also in need of more funding to help its current mission.
United Methodist Open Door and the HOT team echoed the same response as Bibleway and Wichita Family Crisis Center: there’s not enough resources or funding for a designated women’s shelter.
That means a growing number of women who are homeless in the area must find help from other places. “But that doesn’t stop people from calling us all the time,” Meyers said. “It breaks my heart that we can’t help them.”
Loren Amelunke is a student at Wichita State University and writes for The Sunflower. She was the Summer 2024 intern for the Wichita Journalism Collaborative.