Volunteers and local organizations work together to gather data, provide aid and report the number of unhoused people.
On Jan. 29, an annual point-in-time (PIT) count of sheltered and unsheltered people took place in the state of Massachusetts. This year the cities of Medford, Everett and Malden came together with Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) to organize the count with the help of volunteers from across the three areas.
The purpose of the one-night event was to get a rough estimate of the homeless population in the area, as well as to give them some material goods, such as blankets and dry food.
Before the count had started, volunteers had to undergo training. Training took place in Breed Memorial Hall, a space provided by Tufts University. There, Ethan Bagley, a mobile homeless outreach specialist for ABCD and organizer of the count, explained the guidelines.
The three cities were split into 19 zones. These zones were created with the help of Geographic Information Systems experts.
“[ABCD] leveraged some work that Cambridge and Somerville had done with their mapping and previous PITs and built upon it,” Bagley said.
Volunteers were assigned to a zone and split into teams of at least two people, one of whom would have to have a car. Each team was presented with a map of the zone with a list of hotspots. Volunteers were instructed to prioritize these hotspots.
There were two ways an encounter with a homeless person could go: “one [way] is observational and that’s in cases where you don’t feel comfortable approaching, or somebody’s asleep, or for whatever reason, you don’t want to face-to-face talk with that person,” Bagley explained.
The other option is the “interview track.” Volunteers were given a survey, based on a form used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which they could use to record more detailed information about the people they encountered.
However, Bagley pointed out that while this information is valuable, “it’s less important for us to capture demographic data or Social Security Numbers.”
The PIT count in Medford, Everett and Malden is a small part of a much larger effort to coordinate this canvassing event across the entire state.
The data collected will be presented at the federal level. In order to protect individuals’ information, “we created a firewall between the data that the [Continuum of Care programs] get and what the federal government does,” according to Bagley.
Bags with goods were prepared for distribution. According to Bagley, there were roughly $750 in donated goods collected for the count night.
The reason for the count to happen in the middle of winter is to get a more accurate number of people who genuinely do not have anywhere to go. Bagley explained that people tend to move around, an option that is more easily available during warmer times.
“The population is transient, therefore they could be in a completely different place the next night,” he said.
Malden is likely to have a larger homeless population than the other two areas. “[Malden] has three T stations,” Bagley said. “Mass transit is the way that some of these people get around.”
Jason Stone, social services coordinator for the Medford Health Department, explained that in light of recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country, it was important to “make sure that [volunteers] explicitly tell them [they] are not the police, [they] are not ICE.” Stone said that volunteers could encounter “a small handful of immigrants, some documented, some not” during the count.
Nevertheless, the majority of the homeless population that Stone worked with were “people who lost their apartment, lost their house [and] their medical bills piled up.”
Among the volunteers were people from all three cities, including a couple of Tufts University students. Christine Barber, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who represents the 34th Middlesex district, was also one of the volunteers that night.
One of the Tufts students, first-year Harper King, found out about the event through Tufts Project SHARE (Spreading Health Access, Resources and Education.) Another first-year student, Nate Scott, found out about the count through the Tisch College’s newsletter.
“I would love to do it again next year and for me, I’ll definitely prepare a little bit more. Since I only found out about it a couple days before, I’m gonna get a few more of my friends to join me,” Scott said. “Also, for the future, I want to collect more donations. I asked a few of my friends and we got different donations of clothes and hygiene items … that we were able to add to the survival kits.”
A report on the count by ABCD will be made available to the general public in early February.
