The Augusta Commission’s Homeless Task Force met Dec. 16 for the final time in 2021.
Lynda Barrs, chairman of the task force’s action plan committee and Resource Development Director for CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority, reported on a trip to Savannah she and task force co-chairman Commissioner Jordan Johnson made to Savannah to visit The Cove at Dundee. It is a newly built community of tiny houses.
“They are 128 square feet for anybody without a wheelchair; for those with a wheelchair, they’re 144 square feet,” she explained. “They meet the need for one person for housing. They have washers and dryers on site, they have community room for every 24 houses, you can invite family to come over. They provide onsite health care; they have security at night for the residents there.”
This community was built by money and labor from donors, including The Chatham Foundation and the Home Depot Foundation. It was created to house veterans. Residents pay $240 a month in rent, which includes utilities.
MORE: Homeless Task Force sifting through data
Barrs believes a similar project would work in Augusta.
“We could do something like adopt a house for a church, a small church,” she said. “People feel like you know, when I win the lottery, I’m going to do this, but you don’t have to win the lottery to help somebody. We need to understand that it doesn’t take this huge investment. Sometimes, just a little investment can make all the difference in the world and our neighbors. They’re Augustans. They’re our neighbors.”
She also updated the progress made by members of the Street Outreach Team.
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The team, made up of members of the Richmond County Marshal’s Office, Richmond County deputies and volunteers, have been spreading out across the country finding encampments of homeless people. They have counted the number of people living in each encampment, including the number of men, women, children and veterans.
Barrs said the team spent eight hours a day for five days locating the encampments and talking with people living there. The team found 190 unsheltered people in the encampments. Unsheltered mean individuals who are living on the street, not utilizing area shelters.
The task force is gearing up for a major effort in January to get an accurate count of homeless people, both sheltered and unsheltered. The Point in Time count will be the last ten days in January.
“We would like to have at least 200 plus volunteers to do that singular night count,” said Daniel Evans, Planning Development Supervisor from Augusta’s Housing and Development department. “We have enough experienced people, but also enough people that are in a leadership capacity now to make that happen, you know, we can kind of spread them across zones and have some autonomy to cover the whole area and the three- or four-hour span.”
Evans says the 2022 county is particularly important because they had to cancel in January 2021 because of COVID-19.
The activities will kick off with a community resource fair on Friday, Jan. 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Dana Lynn McIntyre is a Staff Reporter with The Augusta Press. You can reach her at dana@theaugustapress.com
