Clarifying Your Demand

The heart of your Registry Week is getting to know your neighbors experiencing homelessness by name. In a sense, this is understanding the demand that exists in your community.

There are steps that can be taken to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness in your community and the types of resources and supports they need. This section of the Toolkit is around clarifying your demand. In addition to the resources that are included here, your outreach workers and service providers will be a key portion of this part of planning for your Registry Week.

1. Start by looking at the Community trends document. This will help you formulate a picture of homelessness in your community. If you don’t know the numbers for some of these cells, then it will help you to begin your research and conversations about the data points that will populate this table.
2. As you begin to think about the scope of the Registry Week, please be sure to include your outreach workers and other front line workers like the police in these conversations to understand where you should be surveying and how many people you can expect to find staying on the streets and/or in your emergency shelters.
3. Consider which Common Assessment Triage Tool you will use as part of your Registry Week. See the Coordinated Access Page – Common Assessment section for more information. Sample joint PiT/Registry surveys (for which you can just use the Registry portion if needed) using the VI-SPAT suite of tools is included in the PiT and Registry Week Coordination Packet 2020 and the Registry Week Quick Links Document.
4. Finally, open the two sample Survey Notices (from Waterloo Region and San Diego). They were used to bring awareness to their Registry Weeks amongst people in the community that were experiencing homelessness.

Back: 2 – Building a Strong Local Team

Next: 4 – Volunteers: Planning and Recruitment