Homeless count and evaluation of services to go in County of Grande Prairie
A survey will be launched later this month by the Alberta Rural Development Network (ARDN), to gather data on the number of homeless and people facing housing challenges in the County of Grande Prairie, while also gathering information on the relevant services available to those individuals.
This is the second Rural Homelessness Estimation Project done in the County, the first was performed in 2018. However, Julia Juco, the community lead on the Rural Housing and Service Needs Estimation Project, says there were some difficulties in gathering responses in the first survey, mainly because of the use of the term ‘homeless.’
“One of the things we did for this year’s count, is that we tried to really step away from that stigmatizing term of homelessness, and kind of really capture what we are actually trying to look for in our data, which is more asking people about their housing situation, and kind of the services they’re accessing in the community,” says Juco.
Juco adds that in rural communities, homelessness isn’t alway visible like it is within cities.