City’s homeless count to use fewer volunteers

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This article was published 16/07/2024 (418 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

End Homelessness Winnipeg will rely on fewer volunteers for the upcoming tally of Winnipeg’s homeless population.

Manager Elijah Osei-Yeboah said the pandemic affected the typically strong volunteer roster.

Previous point-in-time counts in 2015 and 2018 had around 300 volunteers who helped to make contact with homeless poeple in the city over a 24-hour period.

In 2022, when the most recent count was completed, there were fewer than 200 volunteers.

“We realized that it would be better to reduce our reliance on volunteers,” Osei-Yeboah said.

For this year’s count, the organization will rely more on community outreach teams and groups familiar with the city’s homeless population, while also recruiting around 100 volunteers to assist.

The count, yet to be announced, will also take place over four days, instead of the 24-hour period previously required by the federal government.

In addition to counts from face-to-face interactions over the four days, EHW will include hospital discharge data for those who report no fixed address, and numbers from local shelters.

The goal of the count isn’t an all-encompassing picture, but rather what Osei-Yeboah called a “very good estimate” of the homeless population.

According to past counts, there were at least 1,400 homeless people in 2015, 1,519 in 2018, and 1,256 in 2022.

“As we continue repeating this exercise, it will help us determine trends in homelessness,” Osei-Yeboah said.

One of the biggest limitations to the count is missing those who couch surf or live temporarily with friends, commonly referred to as the “hidden homeless.”

“To be able to accurately capture that, you would have to knock on every door in the city,” Osei-Yeboah said, acknowledging the count underestimates the true number of homeless people.

Jino Distasio, an urban geography professor at the University of Winnipeg, who co-ordinated a six-year project on homelessness in Canadian cities, questioned the motivation and usefulness of the count.

“These are resource-intensive, complex endeavours that are often really challenged to accurately assess who’s living not in permanent shelter in our city,” Distasio said.

He suggested the count is “really about checking a box” rather than putting resources into addressing the root issues that lead to someone living on the street.

Despite the limitations, Osei-Yeboah insisted collected data provides useful insights.

“In 2022, for instance, we realized that Indigenous people… were more likely to live unsheltered, than stay in a shelter,” Osei-Yeboah said.

Data from that year also suggests Indigenous people are over-represented among Winnipeg’s homeless population, and that a strong correlation exists between being involved with child and family services and being homeless.

“That means that if you’re able to stop the flows into homeless from CFS, we stand a higher chance of moving the needle on homelessness within Winnipeg,” Osei-Yeboah said.

Siloam Mission spokesman Paul Loewen said the point-in-time count provides some insight into the city’s homeless population, but said he would like to see a “co-ordinated data system” with more up-to-date information.

“Once every (few) years doesn’t get frequent enough to draw a trendline, but it’s valuable nonetheless, in the sense that we need to have that snapshot in the absence of better, co-ordinated data.”

jordan.snobelen@freepress.mb.ca