BARNSTABLE – Barnstable’s Committee to Assess Homelessness in Hyannis has been transformed into the Committee to Assess Homelessness in Barnstable.
The change is designed to broaden the reach of the committee to the entire town.
Town Councilor Britt Beedenbender was named chair. Beedenbender, who estimates the homeless population of Barnstable County is around 400 individuals, hopes to bring all of the public and private social service agencies together in a collaborative effort.
“We have a number of groups that are working independent of one another to address the issue and really we don’t have a comprehensive, all folks at the table, working on this population in one unified effort,” said Beedenbender.
Beedenbender plans to focus the committee’s efforts on a housing based approach, believing that housing is a fundamental piece to the solution.
That would be a shift from a service based approach that was developed to address concerns from business owners, and environmental groups.
“How do you expect someone to deal with their alcoholism, or to get themselves a job when they are literally sleeping in a tent, or on the ground in the woods?”
Beedenbender also referenced the success that Santa Clara County California and Bergen County New Jersey have had with housing based approaches.
“Everyone who works in this field wants to wrap their arms around it, and come to a permanent long term solution, but in order to that it requires that the county, the town, and the individual providers are all working together, and that is the new place that were at,” said Beedenbender.
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