The City of Kamloops will be conducting another point-in-time homeless count next month.

Community and Emergency Supports Supervisor, Natasha Hartson, tells NL News it will take place over a 24-hour period, beginning in the evening of April 12.

“Anyone who is staying at a shelter that evening will be a part of the count,” she said on NL Newsday. “Then on the second day as part of the rest of the 24-hours, we actually go out to the streets and we go into areas where the unhoused may be such as riverbanks, parks, and alleys in groups and survey and count individuals that way.”

The last such count in Kamloops in April 2021 identified 206 people experiencing homelessness, up from 201 in the 2018 count.

“It happens always over 24 hours, generally at similar times of year, year-over-year, so we can use that comparison data,” Hartson added.

The idea is to both count the number of people experiencing homelessness and why they are in that situation, though advocates say the hidden homeless – like couch surfers or people living in their vehicles – are likely to be under-represented.

“These are definitely numbers that we utilize in those conversations that we’re having with BC Housing and partners around how many spaces that we need to be prepared for,” Hartson said.

“We’re fully aware that there is limitations and undercounts in it, but it is one key methodology piece in a series of other things you can use to tell the story of homelessness.”

Hartson expects to present a final report with the findings to Kamloops City Council sometime this fall.

“The city of Kamloops will specifically use [the data] often in order to make some decisions and to understand the needs that we have as a community,” she said.

“The data also gets shared with our stakeholders and our community partners. I know they use the data to apply for grant funding, and then the data also gets fed into a provincial report to put Kamloops as part of that provincial conversation.”

The Homeless Services Association of BC says similar counts took place in 11 municipalities across the Lower Mainland Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning this week.

It says counts are also scheduled to take place in Quesnel, Williams Lake, Salmon Arm, Cranbrook, Port Alberni, Cowichan Valley, the Fraser Valley Regional District, Nanaimo, Prince George, Salt Spring Island, and Whistler this year.

– With files from Brett Mineer and The Canadian Press