One of many teams casting a wide net to find and count as many persons without shelter as possible. My team of three persons, over a nearly four hour period, participated in a mandatory 90 minute orientation meeting the week before the count date to install an interactive survey/interview form app on my phone, practice using the app, and review tips to be safe while being non-threatening. When we encountered an individual who appeared to be a person without shelter in areas overgrown by shrubs, grass and who knows what kind of wild life, trash areas behind stores in strip malls, public parks and convenience stores, one of us would engage the person in an 8-10 minute collection of demographic data. I was surprised with how people, after an initial minute of caution and suspicion, were willing to participate in the survey, often providing personal details of their situation which were not part of the survey.
There were approximately 100 volunteers with nearly a fifty-fifty split responsible for Manatee County and Sarasota County. The data collected by these volunteers will be aggregated in a standard US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) form that will be submitted to HUD and be the basis of the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report.
This report, according to HUD: “is a report to the U.S. Congress that provides nationwide estimates of homelessness, including information about the demographic characteristics of homeless persons, service use patterns, and the capacity to house homeless persons. The report is based on Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) data about persons who experience homelessness during a 12-month period, point-in-time counts of people experiencing homelessness on one day in January, and data about the inventory of shelter and housing available in a community.”
