With less than a week away before the annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, officials are seeking more volunteers to help with the three-day operation, which they say will be made smoother due to several improvements.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority will conduct its point-in-time count Jan. 20-22. While the agency has nearly 3,000 volunteers registered so far, the goal is to have about 4,200 volunteers. Anyone who is interested in volunteering can sign up at theycountwillyou.org.
The count will begin Tuesday in the San Fernando Valley and the metro Los Angeles area. Volunteers in the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles will count on Wednesday. Finally, the count will wrap up Thursday in the Antelope Valley, West and South Los Angeles, and the South Bay/Harbor region.
The cities of Glendale, Long Beach and Pasadena conduct their own counts through their respective health departments.
The count allows local governments to satisfy the Housing and Urban Development Department’s regulations. It also serves as an annual assessment of how many people are living on the streets.
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, encouraged residents and city workers to volunteer if they can.
“It is a volunteer-led count, and the more people that do it, the more accurate the numbers are,” Raman said during Tuesday’s City Council meeting. “We want everyone to sign up as early as possible. Last year, we had a shortage of volunteers, especially in (San Fernando Valley) sites,” Raman added.
Ahead of the count, LAHSA officials said they are enacting several improvements for the operation.
The homelessness agency will be using an app-based data collection process for the fourth year in a row and improved maps, assigning more staff to provide technical support and help with supply distribution at deployment sites, and to ensure volunteers collect their materials to get the count done quickly and efficiently.
LAHSA also simplified training materials to improve the volunteer experience, according to officials. Training materials were updated for deployed site coordinators and logistics specialists to ensure consistency in process across Los Angeles County.
LAHSA is coordinating with the county’s Department of Health Services and Emergency Centralized Response Center for additional outreach staff support. This improvement is expected to aid in “special consideration” census tracts and areas, and more rugged locations such as basins, creeks and deserts that are too dangerous, hard-to-reach or inaccessible for community volunteers.
Lastly, the processes for the Housing Inventory (sheltered) and Youth counts have been overhauled to improve response rates and generate bigger samples.
The Youth Count will be conducted over nine additional days for those aged 10 to 19. In a similar fashion, the Housing Inventory Count will begin earlier to optimize data review and make it easier to validate responses.
“It takes our entire community to solve homelessness. We need our friends, families, and colleagues to join us in counting next week,” said Gita O’Neill, interim LAHSA CEO. “We are especially looking for additional volunteers in the San Gabriel Valley, East LA County, and the South Bay region. The count provides critical insights about our unhoused neighbors. With everyone’s combined efforts, LAHSA can help direct services where they will be most effective to address homelessness in Los Angeles.”