Calgary counts people experiencing homelessness

More than 100 volunteers walked the streets of Calgary Tuesday night to conduct the 2022 Point in Time (PiT) Count of the homeless population, in order to support systems and service planning.

Patricia Jones, CEO of Calgary Homeless Foundation, says it’s a national outreach initiative done in partnership with the Government of Canada.

“Doing a one-night count of people experiencing homelessness as a measure of the rate of homelessness in our city,” Jones said.

“16 organizations, 32 groups, and they went out through the entire city in groups of three with a survey to ask specific questions about demographic, ethnicity and what brought them to homelessness.”

Calgary has conducted a PiT Count every two years since 1992.

Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo use the same method for their counts, allowing trends in homelessness to be identified across the province.

“The data will come in and we’re doing it with seven cities across the province. It’s a national outreach initiative. And so it will take several months for the data to be validated and be tested for reliability and put within context. So it will be released in the next couple of months,” Jones said.

The count helps different levels of government decide how to allocate resources and create a system of care that best serves the vulnerable.

The last full PiT Count was conducted in 2018. The 2020 PiT Count was canceled due to the pandemic.