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It Has to be Both
Reflections from the front lines serving people experiencing homelessness, battling the heat of "Spring," and fighting for systems change.
We seem to have skipped right over a legitimate Winter and Spring here in Phoenix. I am not a meteorologist, climatologist, or otherwise an expert in weather or climate. However, in going back through posts I wrote over the last couple of years, this sense of "the heat is here" keeps moving up earlier and earlier in the calendar year.
Raising awareness of the effects on heat is a crucial and ongoing part of our work here at Keys to Change.
Living outdoors is life threatening when the temperatures are high during the day and don't cool down overnight. Heat stroke seems imminent... I really don't know how people survive. The invisibility of heat can cause us to be unaware, to think it unbelievable. And the truth is that heat is deadly. We are moving into full-on heat relief mode and launching the annual Thirst Aid effort mid-April. Follow along at keystochangeaz.org to offer support. It's not too early to organize a collection drive of bottled water!
The preparation is absolutely necessary as we continue to shelter 900+ individuals nightly on Key Campus in three spaces (CASS' Single Adult Shelter, Respiro, and St. Vincent de Paul's Overflow). And the Keys to Change outreach team engages with the unsheltered daily. Number-wise the team counted 291 individuals in the immediate area of the Key Campus on March 31 and an additional 368 unsheltered people in the expanded downtown area. The total unsheltered engaging with our team is 659.
The total we are serving daily through outreach and shelter on Key Campus is 1,559.
Every day the Keys to Change team provides a variety of services to these individuals. And at Key Campus a dozen partner organizations offer additional services. This daily work is meeting each individual person where they are and offering steps to housing. Our collective objective is to assist each human being in ending their homelessness.
In addition to the by-person work, Keys to Change is working, or fighting, for systems change...read more here...
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