Trying to prevent homelessness in Watertown area

WATERTOWN, New York (WWNY) - Some people have no place to call home and the Watertown Urban Mission is trying to prevent homelessness in our area.

The mission partnered with local agencies to host an open house on Thursday, helping those who need it with information related to housing instability.

That isn’t where the work stopped, however.

Volunteers from various organization also took to the streets to identify those experiencing homelessness, trying to connect them with resources that may help them in the future.

“It’s about including the folks who are experiencing homelessness in the conversation because we need to better understand what brought them to this point in time and then we need to decide as a community what are we going to do about it, how are we going to help,” said Dawn Cole, Watertown Urban Mission.

“A lot of housing situations, housing insecurity, has been more pronounced, which had led to a lot more of us in our community seeing more crisis of homelessness,” said Ashley Wilson, peer team supervisor, Mental Health Association.

Known as the “point in time” survey, this is usually done for the state in January.

Cold conditions often mean low response rates in the north country, however, so officials decided to conduct it here during the summer instead.

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