Monday night at the Joplin City Council meeting, the President of the consultant group Sharity, Carol Wick provided a presentation about improving homelessness in the city.
KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.
Although the most recent point-in-time count conducted by the Joplin Homeless Coalition in January showed that the number of homeless individuals compared to 2022 was down 22% to 210 people, the problem is viewed as so bad in the community that the Joplin City Council earlier this year approved a six-month contract with Florida based consultant group Sharity to conduct numerous community surveys and gather data to reduce the number of homeless in Joplin.
Sharity President Carol Wick says they received about 800 responses to the question, what is the greatest need that Joplin residents see regarding homelessness. Out of the top five responses Wick highlighted one that she says data does not support.
“Transfer of the homelessness to Joplin from other communities, which interestingly enough is not something that we are finding data to support. But is something that is a community narrative. We’ll continue to investigate that.”
Wick also said that she’s encouraged by the amount of data that the city already has to use and that Sharity is pulling it together and combining it with resident surveys and future town halls so that the data drives the results.
She expects to have a complete plan to present to the city council by the end of this year.
