By JULIANNE HOMOKAY
Special to the Alpine Mountaineer
On Thursday, Jan. 22, massive numbers of volunteers across the United States participated in the Point-In-Time Count, a formal method employed to get in touch with and survey the homeless members of our communities.
The Point-In-Time Count is conducted by every community nationwide during the last 10 days of January. By coordinating this same timeframe across communities, the Count acts as a “snapshot” for government officials and social scientists to compare from year to year, “a more precise picture of who is unable to access emergency shelter or other crisis response assistance” (from “Homeless Count and Survey Volunteer Training” by San Bernardino County). The Count is conducted in winter given the likelihood that the group of local agencies who coordinate resources for the homeless in a given region, called a Continuum of Care (CoC), will be maximizing its resources to serve their needs. The Point-In-Time Count is the largest source of information to enable funding to homeless programs per the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD.)
Local efforts to coordinate the program and deploy volunteers are headed by the Mountain Homeless Coalition based at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church in Skyforest, and led by their tireless board president Sue Walker. This year for the first time, I joined the folks at St. Richard’s for the training on Jan. 12 and a ride-along with an experienced team on the day itself.
Surveys are collected via an app on our phones. I found the technology very user-friendly. County staff were on hand to help us download and install the app, and to guide us through some practice surveys. Walker laid out some ground rules as to how to approach homeless people we might meet out in the field, and also went over how the teams are structured: a lead, who makes sure the assigned zones are covered and that the team returns to the deployment center (St. Richard’s in our case); a counter who conducts the survey, which can be anyone with the app on their phone; and a lookout who maintains situational awareness and focuses on team safety.
Two methods to contact the homeless people in our communities were employed. Via flyers and word-of-mouth, the Coalition invited people to meet-and-greets at fixed locations to do the survey and receive grocery gift cards and hygiene bags. The lead/counter/lookout teams went out into the communities to cover specific zones that have been meticulously catalogued by knowledgeable Coalition members over the years.
I joined the Crestline Lake Drive field team led by Keith Summers, a friendly, extroverted eight-year veteran of the Count who obviously enjoys meeting people, chatting and hearing their stories. He brought a lot of passion to the project: “I have a big heart, I like giving [stuff] away,” he said. Also on our team was another first-year participant, Summers’ wife, Jannessa Torres. Both husband and wife are employed by the San Bernardino County Department of Child Support Services.
Our team covered Lake Drive from the trail around Lake Gregory up to the former Presbyterian church on the corner of Lake Drive and Knapps Cutoff. Despite living here for four-and-a-half years, I was amazed at how many nooks and crannies there are in Crestline where a homeless person could set up camp, and I learned quite a bit about the geography of my own community. We talked to a few people, but didn’t find anyone who qualified for the survey. Summers thought that the turnout at the fixed station in Crestline might’ve had something to do with that, but he also commented on the inconsistent nature of the effort: “Some years you find three people, some years you find 30.”
All in all, on top of volunteering in some small way to help homeless people receive the services they need, the Point-In-Time Count helped me to see my community and the people in it in a new, more aware way. The process is very methodical… yet the participation feels very human. National results of the survey will be available in April.
To learn more about Mountain Homeless Coalition, visit mountainhomelesscoalition.com.
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