One Night Homelessness Count in King County Reveals Continuing Challenges

The 2018 All Home Point in Time (PIT) Count of persons experiencing homelessness was released. The report is a snapshot of one night in January and goes into details about the differing ways people experience homelessness in King County. The report showed a growth of around 4% of people experiencing homelessness with the biggest jump coming from people having to rely on perhaps their last asset, their vehicles.

You can read the full report here.

At FareStart, many of our students live the data highlighted in the PIT report. Nearly 85% of our incoming Adult Culinary students are experiencing some form of homelessness. Our Youth Culinary and Youth Barista Programs see a similar trend.

People come to us because they want a different, more stable future for themselves, and we help give them the tools and support to make it happen. We meet the needs of our Adult Culinary students by offering not only job training, but wraparound services that could include housing assistance, clothing, bus passes and other basic needs that set up our students for success. We also work with housing and social service partners to ensure that our students have a path to stability while they are going through the program.

We support our students throughout the learning process by not only teaching knife skills, but life skills. Our students learn how to overcome their challenges and break down the barriers to finding and keeping a job.

Homelessness is a challenging, complicated issue. It is going to take a multi-tiered approach to solve it. 

On July 19, Seattle media organizations will be focusing on the complicated, changing problems of homelessness in the city. You can follow their work by using the hashtag #SeaHomeless on Twitter or Facebook or just make sure you are checking their webpages on that day.

Here is a link to the announcement from Crosscut.