Bancroft and North Hastings will be part of Hastings County’s point-in-time homelessness count on Thursday.
Part of a national effort, the goal is to total the amount of people experiencing homelessness in communities across Canada.
The county’s manager of homelessness initiatives and prevention, Shannon Tummon-Graham, said county officials are working alongside local service providers and organizations like Well-Being North Hastings.
“The point-in-time count enumeration is mandated by the federal government…so we have to do it across Hastings County, and it’s a national point-in-time count,” she said.
“So there is a window of time where each municipality and/or service manager can decide when they want to carry out the point-in-time count. It just has to be over a 24-hour window.”
During last year’s point-in-time count, 210 people were counted, and 41 of them were counted in North Hastings.
A survey is administered every three years during the count to collect more information about people’s experience with homelessness. Last year was a survey year.
According to the county’s report, 143 people were surveyed, and 46 per cent said they were experiencing chronic homelessness.
Additionally, 27 per cent of survey respondents said they first experienced homelessness as a child or youth (from birth to age 19), and 31 per cent self-identified as Indigenous.
Tummon-Graham said the county keeps a by-names list of individuals experiencing homelessness, so the point-in-time count will help inform if their by-names list is up-to-date and accurate.
“That is the data source that we rely on across Hastings County, to know our homeless folks and who they’re connected with. So, in a perfect world, our by-name data would be roughly the same numbers as our point-in-time count,” she said.
As an example, she said if the by-names list for Madoc has 20 people on it, they’d hope to count about 20 people during the point-in-time count.
“We want our data to all be consistent.”
She said the point-in-time data they send to the federal government is anonymous, so they don’t collect identifying information during the count. But, she said they’re hoping to work with local service providers on the day to complete some separate work to bring as many individuals onto the by-names list as possible.
Local data from the county and national data from the federal government will be made available after the point-in-time count.
