Recent headlines saying outreach workers would not be out on the streets counting homeless people this month raised some eyebrows.
However, Partners In Care Director Laura Thielen said her group and its partner on the neighbor islands, Bridging The Gap, are only mandated to do the count every other year. She said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development changed its funding cycle to a two-year term.
"In regards to the number of people that we have working on it, last year, we had well over 300 — I think almost 400 people volunteering or working as part of their agency work, out in the field. That's just a lot of resources that get taken advantage of," she said.
Throughout one day in January, in past years, volunteers surveyed the homeless population on the island.
Thielen said now that the organization is taking this break, it will be able to study the data it already has through a partnership with the University of Hawai'i.
"I think there will be studies and deeper dives into the data that we already have that will really help us figure out not just how many folks are experiencing homelessness, but more importantly, why are people falling back into homelessness after being housed? What are the reasons that people are precariously housed? And figuring out what are the services that are really in our gaps right now?" she said.
Thielen shared that over the last year and a half, there has been a huge increase in beds for the homeless through Gov. Josh Green's kauhale initiative. However, she said PIC doesn't have a lot of information about the kauhale communities.
"They're not collecting as much data as we want them to collect, so we're also focusing a lot of our time to making sure that any new resource that comes online that they are connected into the system so that they can actually provide that continuity of care for those folks out on the streets," she said.
The Point In Time Count will take stock of homeless people in shelters this year, and plans to be back out on the streets in January 2026 — as required by federal law. However, Thielen shared that the count is only one piece of data, and it's not always perfect.
"Community members are like there's much more homeless than this, and we admit it, that it's not a perfect count. It never will be. But, if we pair that kind of data with like our inflow and outflow data — the inflow and outflow data that we have actually shows exactly how many people get any type of homeless service throughout the year," she told HPR.
Thielen said that more than 12,000 individuals have received some type of homeless service or housing. "That, to me, is a much more important number because we know there's many more out on the streets that are not getting all those services," she said.
Partners In Care is looking at creating a dashboard or study that will predict, based on the Point in Time Count, how many others are experiencing homelessness.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Jan. 17, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.