The Kenai Peninsula Continuum of Care, along with other service providers, will be conducting the 11th annual Project Homeless Connect event from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 26th at the Soldotna Regional Sports Complex. Transportation will be available to and from the event.
Jodi Stuart told KSRM:
“Project Homeless Connect is a one-day event where we connect individuals experiencing homelessness or near homelessness with services. Those services range from tobacco quit kits, haircuts, vaccinations this year, lifeline phones, animal rescue, food stamps, hand massages, case management information, recovery, and sober living resources. Individuals that are having issues with housing, find themselves not knowing where they’re going to stay that night, they can come on this day and have access to all these services all in one place at their convenience.”
Stuart spoke on if there’s more people in need of these services:
“Interestingly enough, over the last two years, we looked at the data and the data is kind of all over the place. We would have liked to have seen decreasing numbers of homelessness, but the reality is, we’re seeing numbers continue to increase and COVID, I believe, continues to impact it. Last year, with our project homeless connect, due to COVID mitigation issues, we weren’t able to have an in-person event, so we weren’t able to really accurately do a good quality count. This year, due to COVID mitigation policies and rules that we’re going to be working with, including mandatory masking, temperature checks and screening, we are going to be having an in-person event. Our hope is we’ll have a much more accurate count of what’s happened kind of as we’re moving through this pandemic.”
