CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Using their smartphones to see in the dark, Kevin Johnson, Amy Wolfe and Julie Alston walked along the railroad tracks on Charleston’s East End early Wednesday morning, looking for homeless people.
Johnson, a homeless outreach worker for Prestera, led his team first to an area behind Laidley Field. City officials broke up an encampment there last summer, Johnson said, but the people came back.
On this 20-degree morning, the group was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know if they picked up and moved, but I saw them Tuesday,” Johnson said.
The trio was among more than two dozen volunteers who helped with an annual count of the homeless Wednesday morning.
Volunteers gathered for instructions before 6 a.m. at Covenant House before dispersing to canvass the area.
Traci Strickland, director of homeless services for Prestera, said volunteers and service providers would count all day Wednesday and then sit down to make sure no one was counted twice.
“We’re up to around 22 people,” Strickland said around 9 a.m. “That number will grow throughout the day as outreach workers are out. They’re counting at Manna Meal - asking people were they slept last night. The centralized assessment center is doing the same thing, just in an effort to capture everyone.”
Strickland said based on the number of people who have been at local warming shelters on recent cold nights, she estimates there are between 50 and 60 unsheltered homeless people in Kanawha, Boone, Clay and Putnam counties. She didn’t yet have an estimate for the number of people who stayed in shelters.
Stickland said she plans to have more information from the count ready in time for the Charleston Homeless Taskforce’s homeless symposium slated for Feb. 27.
The count is a requirement for communities who receive funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD requires them to do the count on one day during the last 10 days of January, Strickland said. In past years, all of West Virginia counted on the same day. This year, Charleston and Huntington both did theirs Wednesday, she said.
“(That) is really helpful because we have a lot of people who go back and forth between Charleston and Huntington,” Strickland said. “For example, if they did their count last week and we did ours this week, there could have been people really counted twice because they went back and forth.”
Besides being a HUD requirement, the count is also an opportunity for service providers to tell unsheltered people where they can get food, shelter and other services.
One volunteer group on Wednesday morning found a 23-year-old woman and her dog sleeping outside a store at Southridge Centre. Tara Martinez, director of Manna Meal, said the woman was referred to the city’s family reunification program in hopes she and the dog could get a bus ticket home to Georgia.
Many of the volunteers were the staff members from homeless service providers. A handful of officers from the Charleston Police Department also participated. Strickland said the police involvement started four years ago and the department’s relationship with homeless providers has gotten better and better. The officers add an element of safety and knowledge, Strickland said.
“They know a lot of our guys as well as we do,” Strickland said, referring to the city’s homeless people. “Now it feels like (the police officers) are one of us.”
Alston, HUD’s Charleston field office director, said the count informs where the city might direct its HUD funding, but it doesn’t determine how much HUD funding it receives.
“The count is crucial in understanding the scope of homelessness and in measuring our progress in reducing it,” Alston said in an email to the Gazette-Mail.
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After leaving the first location, Johnson led his group to the Living AIDS Memorial Garden on Washington Street East. It’s another place where he often finds homeless people. But as with the spot by the railroad tracks, there was no one there Wednesday morning. On Kanawha Boulevard downtown, they caught up to a man carrying a bag of his belongings as he descended the stairs to the river.
Wolfe, an outreach coordinator for Manna Meal, asked him if he has gloves, then took her own off and handed them to him.
“You take mine for now and I’ll see about getting you some others at lunch,” she said.
The team talked with the man about what services he’s getting and whether he’s applied for housing. Johnson gave the man his cellphone number and business card. They invited him back to breakfast at the soup kitchen, but he declined.
“I’m going back to sleep,” the man said. “I didn’t get much sleep.”
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