Presented at: National Homeless Services Data Consortium, Nashville, TN
Presented on: 04/15-04/17/2019
The planning process for conducting an accurate point in time homeless count in larger regions such as Texas Balance of State, King County, and Dallas can be a daunting undertaking. Like any large project, it is often best to break this work down into manageable tasks and to use lessons learned by others to help inform the process. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of how open source and free tools can be utilized alongside both open and private data sets to inform the entire count process. Topics covered include recruiting volunteers, using historical data to establish count routes, creating balanced count teams, monitoring the count, establishing a sampling and enumeration methodology (if needed), and using open source tools such as QGIS and Tableau, and using open data sets such as US Census and the HUD GIS Tools to analyze the data for racial disparities.