On Tuesday, Sept. 27, a group of Guilford County commissioners met with Greensboro and High Point City Council members in the first ever meeting of the Guilford County Task Force On Homelessness. Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Skip Alston said he was strongly encouraged by the commitment expressed by all parties to take on the problem of homelessness in Guilford County in a wholistic and unified way.
Top staff members from the cities and the county were there as well.
The meeting was not a public meeting.
Alston formed the task force with lightning speed after a meeting about a week earlier when he came to believe that too many groups are going off in opposing directions in their attempt to solve the problem that’s become huge in Guilford County in recent years.
“The only thing I wanted to know at this meeting was: Do we have buy-in from everyone to work together in a holistic way to address the problem?”
Alston said the answer to that question was a resounding yes, and now the task force will hold another meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 19 when staff will bring ideas to the task force regarding what’s working in other places as well as new strategies for the county and cities to use collectively to attack the problem.
Alston said the new task force on homelessness will also work closely with 30 to 35 community groups that cover related issues like mental health problems and drug addiction. He said he wants to include the mayors of the county’s small towns as well – even though the problem isn’t as prevalent in those towns as it is in Greensboro and High Point.
“We will be working together as ‘one Guilford’,” Alston said, repeating a two-word theme he has repeated in regard to many matters in recent years.
So king skip who’s been involved with the commissioners for over 20 years goes to a concert sees a homeless person and suddenly just before the mid term elections a light build goes off in his pea brain. How impressive. Poor skip he’s got ole slo joe syndrome
Do we not have laws against public intoxication, urinating and defecating in public, drug use and abuse, loitering and panhandling? Then solve the problem by enforcing the laws. Get them off the street and protect the citizenry.
Watch out Greensboro/Guilford Country, Skippy will be requesting another bond. His way to solve everything is with more of our money.
“Wholistic”? Don’t professional writers have spell check?
Don’t trust spell check to get it right. Wholistic is an acceptable spelling.
Sadly most of the ideas will be “How do we move them else where”.
I don’t think there is a “w” in the word “holistic.”
What office is he planning to campaign for?
Since the other article on homelessness disappeared, I am reposting from that article:
First of all, any entity that gets government/taxpayer money to address homelessness needs to have to present quarterly numbers on how effective they are at addressing homelessness. And that does not mean some hazy Cure Violence type numbers. They need to present names and bios of people who’s homelessness has been ended by their efforts. If an entity is not ending homelessness for at least a few individuals every quarter, then they have no business being in the business of ending homelessness.
Secondly, “homelessness” is not one issue. You have a range of causes of homelessness spanning from extreme mental illness to someone who is simply down on their luck. The former cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it. The latter may in fact be that simple. The range in between involves substance abuse, criminality, and other iterations of mental health problems. Either way, there is no one simple solution for anyone other than those who just need a short term leg up. Address those people first as they are the simplest to solve then tackle the rest.
I would point out though, that if you keep decriminalizing criminal behavior under the premise that homeless folks don’t need to obey the law, then your downtowns and intersections will continue to be rife with bums doing low level criminal things, along with the occasional serious assault and homicide. All this criminal justice reform has gone way too far the other way and now we are seeing the ramifications of those decisions. Maybe the third time Slim Biggums takes a dump in the street, he should not get a written promise to appear so he can squeeze out that fourth dump on the mayor’s doorstep
One more time: how can the people who caused these problems be qualified to fix it?
Bus the homeless to Chapel Hill; the will love and take care of them there.