250 volunteers gather to help count, survey SLO County’s homeless population

Editor’s Note: Tribune reporter John Lynch participated as a volunteer during the 2024 Point-in-Time Count to get an inside look at the process of surveying San Luis Obispo County’s unhoused population.

Around 250 volunteers huddled at their meeting points across San Luis Obispo County on Tuesday morning, gathering free breakfasts, reading through information packets and yawning off their early start in preparation for their morning’s task: counting as many homeless residents in the county as possible.

San Luis Obispo County — along with local governments across the country — launched its 2024 Point-in-Time Count starting around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, sending teams of volunteers up and down the streets of the county to count and survey people experiencing homelessness.

Working with Sacramento-based Thurmond Consulting LLC to train volunteers and organize the count, the county gathered data on its homeless population for the first time in two years. The last count occurred in 2022.

Scott Thurmond, principal at Thurmond Consulting and leader of the county’s three volunteer training sessions leading up to the count, said this year’s count bears some key differences to previous years, including new technology for recording homelessness and approaches to gathering data.

While the roughly 250 people who volunteered in this year’s count generally did not have a background in social work, the training provided by Thurmond Consulting covered the basics required to gather data effectively.

Thurmond said some of the most important tools at a volunteer’s disposal were kindness and empathy.

“Before you leave for the actual counts, you’re going to look in the mirror and you’re going to put a smile on your face, and you’re going to keep that smile for the next six hours,” Thurmond told the volunteers.

Volunteers comb through SLO County to survey homeless residents

Though point-in-time count data historically tends to under-represent the true size of homeless populations, it still provides valuable insights into the demographic breakdown of a region’s homeless population.

This data plays a crucial role in local governments and nonprofits’ ability to apply for grants that fit the need of the region’s homeless residents, Lumina Alliance special campaign administrator and volunteer Clementine Ellis told The Tribune.

“When we go to apply for grants, we use that data to kind of show agencies that are grant-giving that we have X amount of homeless people living in SLO County,” Ellis said. “There’s a question this year about violence, so we can say, ‘This percentage of homeless people experience domestic violence,’ so it helps us to do more specific outreach.”

This time, Ellis said she also helped guide the mapping, survey questions and strategy of the count as Lumina Alliance’s representative on the PIT Count Committee, along with representatives of homeless service providers, food and clothing banks, soup kitchens, day shelters, detox programs, mental health providers, social service agencies, law enforcement, advocacy groups and currently and formerly homeless individuals.

Hopefully we come across some people so we get to talk to them and hear a little bit more about their experiences,” Ellis said prior to the count. “You never know what to expect.”

Volunteers Mia Lowry and Joshua Smith were assigned to SLO Team 8, whose five volunteers canvassed parts of San Luis Obispo south of the Old Town Historic District and as far east as the intersection of South and Higuera streets.

Smith said he and Lowry both work in downtown San Luis Obispo and are accustomed to seeing encampments near their jobs.

Lowry said the couple saw an advertisement for the count on Nextdoor and decided to try their hand at volunteer work without any previous experience in homelessness or surveying.

“It was a good opportunity to see more of what is being offered in the county, and great to work with people providing other homeless services,” Lowry told The Tribune after the count.

2024 PIT Count adds new survey questions, technology

Training for the 2024 PIT Count started in early January and spanned the course of three sessions held at the San Luis Obispo Veterans Hall.

Thurmond ran the training, instructing volunteers on how to approach people, how to conduct a survey and how the work would be divided among the roughly 250 volunteers.

Thurmond said he has around 20 years’ experience in running PIT Count training, but said San Luis Obispo County’s volunteer needs were much higher than many other counties due to the region’s “geographically fairly spread out and very diverse” homeless population.

“Typically, with most jurisdictions we’ll have somewhere between 40 and 50 volunteers, but because of the geographics here, we need more than that,” Thurmond told The Tribune.

Volunteers were instructed to download the Survey123 app on their phones to collect survey data and submit GPS locations for each homeless individual they counted, and they practiced using it in real time by running mock surveys with each other.

Questions in the survey included basic information on age, race, place of birth, length of homelessness and household size, along with others that were more open-ended, asking homeless individuals what barriers currently prevented them from finding housing and what services they needed the most.

For cases in which volunteers could not successfully make contact with a homeless individual and get permission to do survey, Thurmond also said an “observational count” could be used by each team’s guide to record basic, observable data such as age, race and gender. Thurmond told volunteers to use observational counts “sparingly,” as United States Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines advise counts consist of no more than 20% observational data.

This is one of the main ways in which 2024’s PIT Count differs from previous years, Thurmond said.

“The questions always change every year for every jurisdiction,” Thurmond told The Tribune. “It’s basically more focused on actual interviews with individuals, rather than observing and just counting.”

“In previous years, the methodology was different,” Thurmond Consulting senior consultant Amy Wyatt added. “There was more of a sampling approach, but this year, we’re doing what HUD calls a complete census count.”

Following the training, each volunteer was assigned to a logistics center in towns and cities around the county, and further divided into teams of five the day of the count, with each team assigned a set of neighborhoods to survey.

Each team included a guide, who had either been on outreach teams before, had extensive knowledge of the area or had experienced homelessness in the past, Thurmond said.

True size of SLO County homeless population to be determined

The 2022 PIT Count — which was postponed a year due to COVID-19 — was released in June 2022, around four months after the count was conducted.

That count found there were 1,448 people experiencing homelessness in San Luis Obispo County on the night of Feb. 23, 2022, of which 92% were without shelter.

Volunteer and San Luis Obispo City Councilmember Emily Francis said she hoped the data obtained through the count would help guide local homelessness policy.

Francis pointed to the recent announcement of a $19.4 million Project Homekey grant from the California Department of Housing and Community Development that will be used to convert a San Luis Obispo Motel 6 into affordable housing units as a direct effect of gathering data on the homeless population.

“I’m a huge fan of data,” Francis said. “Data is essential for setting policy and being able to determine where we’re putting our resources, and if we’re putting resources in a place that’s actually garnering results.”

San Luis Obispo County Department of Social Services program manager Kari Howell said this year’s count data will likely be released in the next few months.