"There is trust and leadership in homeless communities. It is just that the greater community hasn't accepted it yet." - Stories and Narratives. SDCWR team engaged ten staff and community connectors to support the Point in Time Count, and most importantly, to collect life stories and narratives to complement the quantitative data. Our approach, embedded in lived expertise and relationships built over decades, is grounded in the realization that we still make important decisions based on numbers whereas the qualitative data is left out. Quantitative data has a notoriousness to generalize and overstate the arguments, is taken at face value, and yet maintains its reputation to be an accurate measure of social phenomena. 

Eight of the SDCWR team members had a lived experience of homelessness at some point in their life. Many have been advocates for years, struggled to regain solid ground under their feet for themselves, their families and their peers. They dedicated 134 hours to the count, and collected 85 surveys, encountered 70 more homeless, and collected stories and narratives committed to amplify the voices of the homelessness. They also agree that if the weather was warmer, there was more time, more people would have been reached, especially the hidden homeless. 

Without their wisdom and relationships, the engagement this year would not have been as revealing, as compassionate, and visionary. Read the Stories and Narratives Report and share your side of things.