We didn’t just count…we talked too – to a published writer from Philadelphia, to an undocumented mom with her 29-year old son with cerebral palsy, and to “Eddie,” whose mom died last year and with it, his dreams of living life out in her Miami home. The chatting goes along with the counting…it was Miami-Dade County’s annual Point-in-Time (PIT) census, which began at 10 PM on January 27, 2022, and continued into the early morning hours on the 28th. 

Through this initiative, outreach teams fanned out – from Homestead to Miami Beach and North Miami, and downtown conducting the annual headcount of Miami’s homeless. 

The Homeless Trust, the lead County agency for the count, will tally all data points for the entire County by electronically capturing the gender, approximate age, and ethnicity of those unsheltered and sheltered individuals experiencing homelessness and report those results back to US-HUD.

According to US-HUD, they require “Continuums of Care conduct an annual count of people experiencing homelessness who are sheltered in emergency shelter, transitional housing, and Safe Havens on a single night.”

The M Network team always joins for the PIT – it’s the time of year we get to reconnect with the reality and gravity of the issue on which we work so hard to educate our community. We have been advocating for The Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust since 2009 as the agency of record. We don’t take our work for granted because we know we don’t just work for the Trust; we also work for the future of every single person we met on January 27, 2022. To learn more about the efforts taking place nationwide, visit USHUD.