SAN ANGELO, Texas — The Concho Valley Homeless Planning Coalition held its 2022 point-in-time count Thursday. Volunteers and other members of the community conducted a census to help address the needs of those without housing.
“It’s like an annual census, we want to make sure every neighbor counts and the reason we do this is to bring resources into our community if we know how many folks are out there that are homeless we know what we need to be working towards,” Concho Valley Community Action Agency Housing/Development Director, Sarah Eckel, said.
Eckel said one result of the annual point-in-time count is developing programs that care for those in need. She said one of the programs implemented is “rapid rehousing” as a way to help provide a roof over heads of more individuals.
“Actually, one of the things that we’ve been able to do with our point-in-time count numbers is to bring some programs such as rapid rehousing into the community. It is a program that allows us to move our homeless neighbors into a housing unit and do things like pay their deposits and things like that,” Eckel said.
Eckel hopes this year’s count will highlight the depth of the need in the community. This year, volunteers will be conducting the count throughout the entire day as compared to previous years, when the count was only done once in the evening.
“We’ve had a number of volunteers from all sorts of different backgrounds, there’s people from organizations, the City of San Angelo, different non-profits like CVCAA and then we just have great community members who volunteer regularly and they are just looking for those opportunities to help San Angelo and so we’re really happy to have all of them,” Concho Valley Community Action Agency Community Outreach Manager, Sidney Timmer, said.
Volunteers will distribute bags of essentials for those who decide to participate in the “point-in-time count”. Timmer said the CVHPC received a lot of donations which will allow each participant to receive two pairs of socks, lip balm, lotion, nail clippers and many other street essentials.