In September 2008 MLM will welcome nine chronically mentally ill, chronically homeless persons to our new permanent supportive housing project in Kansas City, KS.  Grace Homes was named by Pr. Sally Fahrenthold, a former MLM program director and one of MLM’s honored friends.

Grace Homes is funded by grants from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and H&R Block Foundation.  It is expected that residents of Grace Homes will live in the supportive community environment for many years each.  A full time professional staff person will be on site five days each week and Wyandot Mental Health will support each resident with outreach case management and psychiatric services. 

Be sure to watch for notice of the Grace Homes “blessing” and ribbon cutting ceremony in September. 

MLM is excited about the important opportunity of addressing one of the nation’s most challenging issues: homelessness among those with mental illness. The project will be among the first here to address directly the widespread but often overlooked problem of mental illness among the area’s homeless people.

Mental health issues are estimated to be a major problem for as many as half of the nation’s homeless people, including many military veterans. People with severe mental illness tend to remain homeless for longer periods, have less contact with family and friends, encounter more barriers to employment, tend to poorer physical health, and have more contact with the legal system than other homeless people.