Matt Tibbles is driving through the woods on the edge of Harrisonburg. “We know, just because of OCP, that there's a tent city out here,” he says, craning his neck and looking to the treeline.
OCP — Our Community Place — is a nonprofit homeless services provider in Harrisonburg, and Tibbles is its executive director.
“So we're driving around this gravel road, finding where the tents are.” He spots one about 75 feet off the road and adds, “... which, as is shown here, it's not near the road or anything like that. It's more toward the trees or just right inside the trees.”
Tibbles is looking for people experiencing homelessness to count and potentially survey them.
“We’re out visiting some of the tent cities,” he continues. “Trying to talk to our homeless population to gather as much data as we can to get an accurate count for the Western Virginia Continuum of Care of how many homeless people are here.”
The effort was a part of the Continuum of Care’s yearly Point in Time Count. It was conducted on the night of Jan. 24 and morning of Jan. 25 to approximate the number of unhoused people in the central and upper parts of the Shenandoah Valley.
Kaitlin Heatwole runs the count for the Continuum of Care as its homeless management information systems administrator.
“I'm the data and research person for this area,” she said. “And our Continuum of Care, or CoC, is the area from Harrisonburg to Winchester and all of the counties there, too. So Rockingham, Shenandoah, Page, Warren, Frederick and Clarke counties.”
CoCs are partnerships between nonprofit homeless service providers, local governments, businesses, schools and other institutions working together to address homelessness.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that CoCs nationwide all conduct a count of unhoused people at the end of each January. The data paints a picture of homelessness in the U.S.
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Photo by me.