MINUTES for 2019-11-26 FINAL - Laserfiche WebLink

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Veterans Advisory Committee Minutes November 26,2019 Page 21 Chair Doolittle: Yes. National and I don't know where they got that number from. But I just wrote them back a note, suggesting in that same period of time that 22,000 Veterans had committed suicide and how did that affect the reduction in the homeless population. Of course, I got no reply. No one wants to reply to something that challenges their premise. Then I read another one that said over a seven-year period that they number of homeless Veterans had been reduced by a rather large number but in seven years that like 100,000 suicides. I don't know if we actually have any kind of metric measurement of Veteran homeless in the State of Hawai`i or the County of Hawai`i and how might we find that. Yoshimoto: There's an article on Hope Services Hawai'i, I'm just looking real quickly it says here, Veteran homelessness decreases by 3% it looks like it was done in April 2019. I can look for numbers as we speak, because they do a homeless count every year right? Chair Doolittle: Well I was wondering who would do that kind of demographic information. Sheridan: Who does that? Chair Doolittle: Hope Services, that's that private Lewis: And they just got that huge endowment, grant. $2 million from Amazon. Sales: they go to the (inaudible). She goes around a lot. We do a homeless stand down and we do that Tropical Care thing every year and she targets homeless. We've been doing this now for five years consistently. Almost every year the number of homeless veterans doesn't number more than a handful. We get more plain old homeless people coming through and getting the stuff that we're putting out. Sheridan: I was curious how many actual Veterans. Sales: Yeah, because the Veterans, they stay out there. They don't com4e in and say I'm homeless. They're mostly there by choice and they do their interacting whenever they want to. They don't necessarily get themselves counted. Chair Doolittle: So, there's no way to actually find that information. I've heard that before, it's probably one of the hardest things in dealing with homeless veterans' issues is not only do you have a huge component in mental health that's involved with that but there's this desire not to be identified. Sales: Yeah, the ones that get counted are mostly the ones that have the mental health issues. The ones that don't have that mental health issues hit or miss to catch them. They're out there and they know what they're doing out there and they're ok being out there.