They start before the sun comes up.
Outreach workers with the Welcome House and other organizations gather at the Welcome House’s Covington location early in the morning on Jan. 30 to plan out which spots they need to hit before the deadline on Jan. 31 at 5 p.m. They stuff bags with hygiene supplies and other resources to distribute during the day’s K-counts.
What are they counting? People.
Welcome to the yearly K-count. Welcome House is one of many organizations throughout the state that go out every year at the end of January to catalog the number of people experiencing homelessness both in the local region and throughout the rest of the state. LINK nky accompanied the outreach workers in the early morning hours of Jan. 30.
Everything’s on a timer: The K-counts officially begin the evening of Jan. 29 and extend through 5 p.m. on Jan. 31, but most of the Welcome House’s outdoor surveys begin the morning of Jan. 30, said Amanda Couch, Welcome House VP of program operations.
The K-Counts, which pull both from outdoor surveys and internal data from overnight shelter providers, are the primary means of tracking the number of people experiencing homelessness in Kentucky.
Data collected goes to the Kentucky Housing Corporation, which uses the numbers to track the scope of homelessness, conduct research and allocate funding. It’s an admittedly imperfect tool as there’s no guarantee that people will find shelter the night of the counts, and it’s not always possible to find everyone living outside. Yet, absent any centralized alternative, K-Counts are the primary tools for tracking homelessness in Kentucky.
The TANK depot in Covington is the first stop – Couch said that people experiencing homelessness will sometimes congregate there. If the outreach team met someone living outside, they briefly interviewed them to get basic information about who they were, how long they’d been homeless and if they had accessed services. That is, unless they’re asleep.
“We don’t wake people up,” Couch said, adding that if they found someone asleep, they would usually swing back later in the day to see if they can talk to them after they’ve woken up.
There was only one person near the depot, a man on a nearby sidewalk, slumbering under a heavy blanket. Couch dropped a resource bag next to him, and the team moved on.
Next, the outreach workers sought out known camping sites. The sun still hadn’t come up – Couch and her colleagues, Welcome House COO Brian Van Arsdale and Joshua Prasad, who works for an organization called FwdSlash, switched on their cell phone lights. Couch would occasionally call out, “Welcome House!”
The team located several campsites, but they were all unoccupied, if not abandoned, at least when LINK saw them. The tents had collapsed, laying flat on the gravel with frost rimmed around the cloth. Plastic bags and trash were heaped in piles in the foliage nearby.
Van Arsdale said the fact that sites were empty may actually be a good thing as it means the daytime occupants may have found a place to sleep at a shelter. Often, Van Arsdale said, people living outside will hunker down at a campsite during the day and then seek shelter with a service provider at night, especially when the weather’s cold.
In truth, much of the morning was spent looking for people but finding no one. Indications of ostensible camping sometimes turned up oddities. At one point, what appeared to be a camp ended up being a tree house someone had built in the woods, complete with a spiral playground slide and a balcony. No signs of who might have built it.
The sun came up, and finally, the team located a man, Vern Havenga, feeding alley cats out of his car. The cats congregated on the pavement as Havenga poured both dry and wet cat food into the bottom of a cut-out milk carton.
Couch began asking Havenga questions and tallying his responses in a survey app on her smartphone. Exhaust billowed from back of the man’s idling car, the back seat of which was packed with clothes and other items.
Havenga, who gave LINK nky permission to use his name, said he’d been homeless for about a year after being evicted. An army veteran, Havenga talked about his health history with Couch and confirmed that he received some veteran’s benefits. He stroked a brown and white-haired cat – no collar, dried blood on its left ear but seemingly docile – crouching on the upholstery under the steering column.
“I’m a survivor,” Havenga said.
Couch gave Havenga a resource bag, encouraged him to seek out services, and moved on. As the team was pulling away, another car pulled up next to Havenga. A man exited and began chatting with Havenga. Probably someone he knew checking on him, Couch said.
The team spoke to two other people living outside while LINK nky was accompanying them, Aleshia Baker and Joe Simpson. Couch found them in a tent and began surveying them like she had Havenga, but Baker said they’d already been logged at a recent stay of the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky in Covington.
Couch handed them both blue bracelets, letting other teams know they’d already been surveyed. Simpson asked if Welcome House taught basic survival skills for living outside, like creating simple heating mechanisms and stoves. Couch said that was a good idea.
When asked what people should know as it relates to homelessness in Northern Kentucky, Simpson said that people living through homelessness were as much a part of the community as anyone else.
“They’re usually highly intelligent,” Simpson said. “There are some who are anti-social because of the way the community has treated them, but on average, they’re just like everyone else.”
When asked what people could do to help, Simpson said, “Donate to your community fridge. Get involved with something that makes it a personal experience.”
While doing things like helping out a soup kitchen are helpful, that sort of assembly line-type work doesn’t always allow for the development of human connection, Simpson said.
“If you’re serving in a soup kitchen… you don’t know me,” Simpson said. “You don’t know nothing about me. You can’t relate. You have to be personal. You have to have a vested interest in the people that you serve.”
Learn how to volunteer, donate or otherwise contribute to the region’s homeless service providers at the links below: