A Point in Time

Every family, organization, government has its rituals: the Fourth of July fireworks; the Christmas Eve service; the Pledge of Allegiance opening each City Council meeting. For us at Opportunity, Inc., it's the annual point-in-time census, held during the last week of January.

The purpose of the census is to get an accurate count of the homeless in our two-county region, and to discover a bit about what kinds of people are without shelter. We base our strategic planning on what the survey reveals: Are there more chronically homeless individuals, or families suffering a loss of employment or housing? Are the homeless we have with us young, old, veterans, employed, disabled, working, or literate?

We get a fairly good idea of the extent of homelessness, though we can never capture it all given the vast wooded expanses studded throughout the counties, and the deep reluctance of anyone to tell a stranger that they are homeless.

Still, we pull together a fairly definitive collection of numbers, statistics and maps of homelessness in our area, and that is worth a great deal.

What is worth more, though, is a snapshot in time of how our community's most challenged citizens struggle to survive, and how strong is the will to live. Coming across a homeless encampment can be heart-breaking, when you find a hand-made shack in a desolated area, plastic lounge chair for a bed, and tiny clothes on a clothesline stretched over a sputtering fire. But it can be humbling as well, as you note the incredible ingenuity with which people with few material resources create a facsimile of a home for themselves and sometimes their children.

This year, Keli Cummings, a student at the University of West Florida, led the way in helping us understand the scope of homelessness in our area, beyond the populace that finds its way to the cold night shelters and meal programs. Keli went out Friday, January 25, with a deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, and Saturday, January 26, with a police officer from Crestview (big thanks to our law enforcement officers!).

Keli has a unique quality to recognize what she is seeing. When other team members and law enforcement would walk into an empty space and start to head back to the cars, Keli would note a broken branch and some leaves pressed too hard into the sand. She would track the signs back to an encampment of tents and bedrolls and lounge chairs and the remains of a recent campfire (and sometimes even the people who inhabit these bleak areas). She would watch people as they went into and out of grocery stores and Wal-marts, and know instantly who was homeless and who was not.

Her results rocked me, and I imagine many others. For instance, she and her group found 50 encampments along the beaches and in Destin, most all of which were home to several people. She identified hundreds of homeless persons north of I-10, living in the woods, in cars, and in abandoned buildings. She even documented that there are homeless people in Niceville, something that has long been debatable.

What Keli, and Malva, and Linda, and Donna, and Corey and a host of other awesome individuals learned is that there is no area in our region that is not home to both the unfortunate and the fortunate. The poor are with us, whether we choose to see them or not.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I will pull together all the reports from all over the area, and get our newest round of numbers on the homelessness in our area. The numbers will provide the basis for our strategic planning, grant applications, reports to local, state and federal government, and in our community awareness efforts. But it is the people behind the numbers who tell the real stories: stories of heartbreak, and of hope.