Donation aims to help meet medical needs of homeless people in Wichita. Here’s how

Ascension Via Christi is donating $100,000 to Second Light in an attempt to provide better health care outcomes for the city’s homeless population by coordinating the way they receive medical services.

“Homelessness is a complex public health challenge that directly impacts our health care ecosystem,” Christopher Dodson, the new chief strategy officer for Ascension Via Christi in Wichita, said as he announced the donation at a June 4 press conference.

“We know that untreated chronic conditions are often the driving force that prevents our unhoused neighbors from finding that stability that they so deeply crave,” he said. He also said the donation meets the health system’s commitment to serve the underserved and promote health equity for everyone.

Second Light, Wichita’s homeless shelter, will use the money to pay someone to coordinate medical services, Executive Director Dan Clifford told The Eagle during an interview after the announcement. More about the position can be found on the shelter’s website.

“We know that direct medical care is a component of the work we’re doing, but we also know we need to kind of zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture.”

He said Second Light needs to help the homeless get connected to health care benefits and establish what he called medical homes.

“It’s not just about triaging and emergency medical services,” Clifford said. “It’s about their overall health and wellness in the context of their lifespan, so that means getting people connected to those medical homes while they’re here, building those relationships so that when they are housed they have a place for routine medical care that is not our emergency departments.”

Four things to help improve health care for the homeless

Currently, too many of Wichita’s homeless population are actively using emergency departments because they don’t have anywhere else to go, Clifford said.

Second Light served 1,100 people from Dec. 1, 2025, through March 15, according to information supplied at the press conference. During that same time, Second Light also helped 72 people find housing.

Second Light hopes to accomplish four things through Via Christi’s donation: reduce the number of 911 calls to Second Light, 1025 N. Main; coordinate health care services for the people it serves when it comes to triage and basic services; ensure that these people are connected to medical benefits; and establish medical homes for their long-term care.

To make that happen, the right medical services coordinator will need to be able to understand the health benefit system, including insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and disability coverage, Clifford said.

Specifically, the person will need to understand what the health care ecosystem looks like in Wichita, Clifford said, since no single entity is able to provide all the health care that Wichita’s 1,600 homeless people need.

“The skill set this person needs to have … is helping coordinate and facilitate that system being used effectively and strategically to meet the needs of the guests in this building,” Clifford said.

Without this person in place, Second Light has relied on the skill and services provided by a number of different partners, but that process has limitations, Clifford said.

“We know the system is stressed,” he said. “That’s why we recognize there’s no one single solution or entity that can take this on. But what we need to do is then facilitate and be more strategic across the system of how we coordinate care.”

This already has been a year of change for Second Light. In May, the organization responsible for daily operations of the homeless shelter shifted from HumanKind Ministries to Mental Health America of South Central Kansas. And, in March, Second Light leadership said it was looking at reducing the number of beds it provided after Wichita voters overwhelmingly rejected a 1 cent sales tax increase that would have established an endowment for the shelter, among other things.