Blood Tribe joins survey to estimate homelessness in rural Alberta
BLOOD RESERVE – While the issue of homelessness and how to address it has received significant attention and study in cities across Alberta and Canada, the same isn’t necessarily true for rural areas.
That’s the driving force behind the Rural Homelessness Estimation Survey, which is being conducted throughout the month of October in 21 communities throughout the province – including the Blood Reserve.
“It’s not well known that homelessness is an issue in rural communities. And we’ve been working to address that but what’s really lacking is the numbers,” said Dee Ann Benard, Executive Director of the Alberta Rural Development Network, the organization leading the initiative.
She explained that a survey on this scale hasn’t really been conducted before for rural areas anywhere in the world, unlike initiatives like 7 Cities for urban centres. In the 2018 study for 7 Cities – Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo – they found 5,735 people experiencing homelessness in the point-in-time count.