Counting the homeless: Enhanced methods for enumeration of homeless persons through community collaborations

Estimates of the number of homeless persons inform funding allocations, services planning, program evaluations and so directly determine the ability of a community to intervene effectively in homelessness. However, these counts, which HUD mandates be conducted by grantees bi-annually, tend to be relegated to volunteers under the general direction of homeless services providers/community development personnel (who often have minimal expertise in statistical models, sampling and epidemiology) or consultants (who may have quantitative proficiency, but lack an understanding of the exigencies of homelessness). Counts across communities are conducted using methods of variable validity and reliability and thus variable accuracy.

To overcome these challenges, we created a multi-sector collaboration between academia, government, and community agencies that employed community health best practices, epidemiologic methods, rigorous training, and stakeholder capacity building. We applied an Incident Command System Model (used by police and fire for decades and recently adopted by Public Health Preparedness) to generate a valid, reliable enumeration. A Plant-Capture method of statistically estimating undercounting was implemented.

The collaboration and processes were found to build capacity in each of the member sectors: the Health Department used ICSM as a training opportunity; the academics enhanced their community health efforts; the service sector were taught and implemented more rigorous quantitative methods and the community was exposed to public health as a pragmatic and effective discipline.

This presentation details the strategies, challenges and results of these efforts. While the presentation will discuss the theoretical basis of the methods, it will be highly interactive and practical for participants.