How does the Coordinated Entry System work? 

The Coordinated Entry System (CES) is a community-wide process – within HMIS – designed to ensure that individuals and families experiencing homelessness are quickly and fairly connected to available housing and support services. CES standardizes how communities assess, prioritize, and refer individuals for assistance, ensuring a consistent, streamlined process across the homelessness response system. The core components of CES are access, assessment, prioritization, and referral.

• Access ensures that entry points into the system are easy to navigate and equitable for everyone seeking help.

• Assessment uses a standardized tool to evaluate the needs and vulnerabilities of those entering the system, providing a fair and consistent method for determining who needs the most assistance.

• Prioritization focuses on using this assessment data to ensure that the most vulnerable individuals and families are given priority for housing and services.

• Referral connects people to appropriate resources based on their priority status and specific needs, following established guidelines to maintain fairness and transparency.

By integrating these core components, CES transforms a collection of individual projects into a coordinated crisis response system, ensuring that resources are effectively allocated to those with the greatest need.

Our role, as the CES Lead agency, is to coordinate these services and ensure you are connected to the available resources. However, please note that the CES team does not directly provide housing services; instead, we work with a network of providers to manage referrals to housing programs that are participating in the Coordinated Entry System.  Please use the Mainstream Resources button provided to view and/or apply for applicable mainstream resources.

KSHC facilitates the Coordinated Entry System for the Balance of State, which covers all counties in Kansas,  except Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, and Wyandotte counties – See the links provided below if you are out of the Balance of State area and seeking housing services.**

• • Greater Kansas City Area
  • Johnson County
  • Sedgwick
  • Shawne

If you are currently in crisis, please use the crisis resources provided below to find emergency shelter or other resources.

C R I S I S   R E S O U R C E S

Step 1 – Assessment: KSHC will arrange a housing assessment to thoroughly understand your current situation and needs. This assessment enables us to identify the most appropriate services and resources for you. Use the Help Request – Homeless or At Risk (jotform.com) form to submit an assessment request to KSHC. Please know that you can also be assessed and added to CES lists via your current service provider if they are a CES access point. CE access points (access points are CES participating agencies; meaning they can conduct the CES assessment and attend regional case conferencing meetings to advocate for their clients.)

Step 2: CES List Placement: After the assessment, you will be placed on the Coordinated Entry System (CES) list for housing program referrals in your region/the region you would like to be housed in. All individuals/families that are seeking housing services in a region will stay on that CES list for as long as needed/until safe and permanent housing is found.  However, households must be in contact with a service provider to remain on the list; each household is given 90 days (of inactivity) before they automatically expire off of the CES list. 

• TO STAY ON THE LIST, contact an access point in your area or the CES team; service providers with access to the CES database can perform a “check-in,” which restarts the 90 days of inactivity countdown.

Step 3: Waiting for Services: While on the CES list, please be aware that referrals depend on provider availability, case manager capacity, and available funding. Therefore, there might be a waiting period before receiving a referral. It is important to note that a referral is not guaranteed, especially if there are more people seeking services than there are available resources, or if there are no available resources.

• If you find housing while waiting for services, please reach out to the CES team and they will remove you from the list of individuals actively seeking services. Note that being removed from this list does not mean you cannot receive services in the future, it is simply saying you are not currently seeking housing services/are currently housed.

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