Councilmember George Leventhal will host a community meeting on “The State of Homelessness in Montgomery County” from 7-8:30 p.m. Monday, January 29 in the Silver Spring Civic Building.
Leventhal, who chairs the council’s Health and Human Services Committee, will be joined by:
- Uma Ahluwalia, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services;
- John Mendez, interim executive director of Bethesda Cares;
- Christine Hong, director of homeless services for Interfaith Works; and
- Jackie Coyle, executive director of Shepherd’s Table.
Leventhal will present on homelessness research. A question and answer session with panelists will follow, covering the county’s homeless outreach efforts and the county’s “Inside (not Outside)” initiative, the goal of which is to provide housing every identified chronically homeless person in the county.
The 2017 Annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count of Persons Experiencing Homelessness found 894 individuals experiencing homelessness in the county, which was a decline of 9 percent from the 2016, the county said. The 2018 PIT count was held Jan. 24.
“The county has made tremendous strides in recent years in housing our most vulnerable neighbors, but residents rarely get to see the positive impact that our efforts are having,” Leventhal said in a press release. “I look forward to sharing the progress we’ve made at this meeting, and hearing from the public about what they are seeing and experiencing in their own neighborhoods.”
Photo from Wikimedia Commons