RICHMOND, Va. -- Rhonda Sneed and her team with Blessing Warriors RVA fill up their cars with clothes, food, drinks and other essentials. It's part of their daily service to individuals living in and around Richmond with no place to call home.
"There are a lot of new campsites. So they tell us where they are, we've been helping them with sleeping bags and tents," Sneed said. "Once they're set up, we give them nonperishable foods like cans of ravioli, so they don't have to come out to where we are."
On any given day, the nonprofit expects to serve around 200 individuals a day. That number, Sneed said, is expected to increase.
"The numbers have tripled from what we were serving before, it's hard to keep up with them," she said. "Our supply is getting very limited."
What her team sees while serving every day is backed by statistics released by Homeward.
According to Point-In-Time (PIT) data from July 2022, 204 people were reported to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness, the highest number ever recorded for the Richmond area.
"We are really talking about people who have no safe place to be who are staying in places that we're designed to be places to live, so in our community, that might be someone in a tent, in the woods behind a shopping center, it might be someone staying in their car, because they don't have someplace else to be," said Homeward's Executive Director Kelly King Horne. "There's no good day to be homeless, we often think of homelessness during the winter, but in the extreme heat that we've had, and the storms, those are also dangerous and uncomfortable conditions."
Although the PIT data reported a 36% decline in people experiencing homelessness in general compared to July 2021, one of the reasons cited for the decline was because pandemic-related shelters were closed.
"What the pandemic proved to us is that additional supports for these critical, life-saving services, matter," Horne said. "They get used, they make a difference in our community. And we really saw that in this data, in talking to people, many of whom would come inside if we had these options available."
Taylor Garrett, a case manager with Daily Planet Health Services, said the group has seen an increase in the number of patients they've seen experiencing some kind of housing need.
Garrett said while the PIT data provides a snapshot, it only accounts for numbers recorded on one single night.
"It's just to get a snapshot of folks who are staying outdoors or in shelters and experiencing that literal homelessness, but it's not going to capture everybody," she said. "There are people who can refuse to take the survey and they are not necessarily counted in those numbers, and there are, of couple people that we're going to miss because it's only us, outreach workers, who are going out.
"So surveying the city, we only have a limited amount of time, and people who are homeless are moving around a lot. They're doing a lot of different thins that they do, so we're definitely not finding everybody. One of the things about people in shelter, is that you know where to find them."
Homeward suggests that several factors play into the increase in need, specifically citing the lack of shelter options and staffing capacity, as well as a lack of affordable housing.
The City of Richmond does aim to open a 24/7 shelter in November of this year, but it would not be permanent.
Until then, Sneed said she and other volunteers will continue to do what they can to help.
"Hopefully somebody's going to do it right. We're there to help, everybody needs their help. But until then, we gotta help people survive until tomorrow."
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