Homelessness in America
There's an ongoing global issue with homelessness - basically, that it exists. It's an interesting field to work in because people's approaches to homelessness are so varied. There are times when people get that homelessness is a tragedy, and we should do something about it. Then there are the people who congratulate me for working in the field, or seem to feel bad that I'm doing something charitable with my time and they aren't. (I consider that I've been paid to do something that I love and am grateful that this has been possible) And then there are the times where you hear of serious pushback against supports for people experiencing homelessness existing in an area, so much so that there is a word for it - NIMBY-ism or "Not In My Backyard."
Having worked in homelessness for 15 years (it never seems possible that I'm old enough to have done that!) one of the things that I have learnt is that homelessness has a LOT of data; we do point-in-time counts, we have program databases, we often have funding requirements to track program outcomes. But I've often had this squishy feeling in my gut that we are missing opportunities that could really help us in the work that we do because we are not able to, or don't comprehend to potentials of, fully using our data. There are definitely some legitimate misgivings about personal information and privacy and respect for the individual and what we make people go through simply to obtain the "privilege" of receiving support, and those are concerns that need to be managed. But with the data that we do collect, I have always wanted to see more done.
And I feel like I've been waiting for people to come along and do some of the things that I imagine to be possible. But at least in my spheres, I haven't seen being done what I've imagined might be possible - even though I didn't know if it was possible. And so, I decided to do the thing where, when you've been asking the question, "Where is the person to do this?" for a while, that you realize the answer is, "It could be me."
This was actually my original inspiration to go down this data science pathway. To respond to those gut feelings that say, with the data we have and what we collect, we could be doing more. And wanting to do more, and taking what I hear about the power of data in other fields and using it to see more people leave homelessness. To be better at moving beyond just the individual explanations for homelessness and understanding how systemic and structural issues play a huge part. And being able to not just say that, but demonstrate it, and use that information to meaningfully inform policy and decision making in this field.
I've been working away at a dataset for a little while, and the full project is by no means finished - not even close. But our final project for DAND was to visualize and tell a story with data. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to put in some work on my project, and to begin the process of both finding out what can be done with the data, and also telling others about it.
So, I present to you, "Homelessness in America," a brief exploration of nature of homelessness in the United States, its connections to systemic issues, and some of the solutions that are currently seeing results. At the end of the presentation is an invitation to data-type folks to join in on working together on this project. If that would be of any interest to you, no matter your level of experience, I'd love to chat! (Follow the links in the presentation for details!)
