HOPE 2009

On Monday night I participated in the NYC HOPE 2009 project. Hope stands for Homeless Outreach Population Estimate and the project consists of organizing volunteers to wander the streets of NYC (in an organized fashion) surveying everyone we meet to determine if they are homeless and to offer them services if they are. From these surveys NYC has an estimate of how many homeless there are and from changes in the estimates from year to year, they make funding determinations and evaluations of current projects. I was introduced to the project by a friend and was assigned to a neighborhood in the Bronx. I have to admit that when I received my assignment I was somewhat concerned, (white girl walking around the Bronx at night? Not the best of ideas) but I talked to a few people who knew the area and the subway stop I would use was located directly next to the project headquarters in one of the better areas and once I got there I would be with my team for the rest of the night. So off I went.
I am really not sure what to make of the experience. The organizers at my base facility (of which there are a couple dozen across the city) were not very organized, so the evening started off with a lot of confusion including: having our team reassigned twice, not having a team leader in our group, having our police escort reassigned 3 times and not being given the proper paperwork. Fortunately everyone in my group was pretty laid back and we just went with the flow, I finally volunteered to be the team leader (even though it was supposed to be someone who had volunteered before) so that we could just get going.

Our canvas area was a residential neighborhood with almost no open public spaces, which basically meant that there was no where for a homeless person to shelter, therefore there were no homeless people for us to count. I thought our assignment to this area was odd, and two of the people on my team who both work for agencies in the city that work with the homeless confirmed that someone who is homeless is not going to be in that area late at night because there is no where to go to be out of sight (of both police who would make them move on and of people who would harass them). But I suppose that if you want to know if the housing situation is so bad that people are sheltering in places they normally do not use this would be the way to find out.
We canvassed our area from 12:30 – 3:30 am and spoke to 17 people who were out and about who all claimed to have homes. Not that I wanted to find lots of homeless people out on the street, especially as the weather was below freezing, but the experience was somewhat anti-climactic. Especially when we returned to the base and I learned that as the Team Leader, I had to complete some paperwork including an evaluation. Now evaluations are standard procedure for just about everything now adays and one of the most basic tenants of an eval is that responses are anonymous. So when I handed in my evaluation, complete with comments on how unorganized they had been, imagine my perplexity when the worker read it and started questioning me about it while I was standing there! Uh Hello, can we say conflict of interest?

So am still trying to make up my mind about the experience. It wasn’t negative, but it wasn’t positive either. It was just rather blah.
For more on the project check out
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/html/press/pr012709.shtml

And be sure to check out the Department of Homeless Services near you, most cities do some form of counting of the homeless population annually.