In Chile, Everybody Counts: How homelessness census data is shaping public policy and opinion
- Nov 10, 2015
- 4 min read
Next year, Chile will bring together government officials, nonprofit experts, and thousands of volunteers across the nation to perform the country’s third national homelessness count. The last census, in 2011, produced En Chile Todos Contamos (“In Chile We All Count”), a 175-page book enumerating people experiencing homelessness in Chile and reporting on the causes and effects of life on the streets. The book’s introduction declares the process “a key advance for the Ministry of Social Development in its promise to the most vulnerable,” a way for the government to develop a national plan toward ending homelessness in Chile. The upcoming census will be one way of showing progress toward that goal.
“We wanted to make the homeless visible,” summarized Karinna Soto, a Chilean homelessness advocate who was instrumental in getting the census off the ground.
The census didn’t happen overnight. IGH recently sat down with Soto and her colleague Isabel Lacalle, both with the nonprofit CalleLink, which connects people experiencing homelessness with services and promotes public policy change. Both women are also heavily involved with Nuestra Casa Corporación (Our House Corporation), where Lacalle serves as executive director.
Creating a Multi-Sector Census
Soto, who has worked in policy and politics for many years, emphasized the importance of intersectional cooperation in a project of this magnitude: “It was very important that organizations be involved in the process, not just as executors. One of the most important things was to involve the residents, the civil societies.”
“We have worked with the Chilean government since 2003 for better social policies,” Lacalle said. “I worked with the team on the last census. We learned over the years that what is important is to involve different actors in the long-term and create quality programs engaging with the media, politicians, and all citizens on this issue.”
Toward Better Data
But the challenges didn’t end with recruiting. “One of our other challenges was to make it comparable with other countries’ censuses,” Soto explained. One of the long-standing issues in fighting homelessness is the lack of comparable data across borders—an issue IGH has sought to fix with the introduction of the Global Famework—with incredibly varied vocabulary being employed in different locations.
“We worked to create the language [employed in the census]. We created a new concept in Chile, ‘situaciones de calle,’ to say that homelessness is a symptom of social problems, and economic and political effort is needed [to solve it].”
“Situaciones de calle,” or “street situations,” echoes a linguistic shift happening in English, away from “homeless people,” to “people experiencing homelessness.” The change removes the notion of homelessness as an intrinsic part of the person experiencing it, and instead creates the idea of homelessness as an external, non-permanent moment in someone’s life.
This shift was vital for one of the key outcomes census-takers hoped to produce: a change in general attitude toward people experiencing homelessness throughout Chile.
“We worked with ten thousand volunteers,” Soto said. “So we have ten thousand stories about homelessness, ten thousand life experiences. That kind of thing can make a difference in attitudes because people get out [on the street] for the census. Authorities, diplomatic people, and also citizens [talking with people experiencing homelessness] makes a difference, of course, in people’s lives. It works for policies but it also makes a difference for people.”
Lacalle agreed. “After the census it was like the attitude of the nation changed.”
Of course, attitudes weren’t the only things that needed to change. Data gathered from the last census allowed advocates and policymakers to put together recommendations for policy, budgetary, and programmatic changes. And it wasn’t just numbers—a key part of the data collected was based on the idea of allowing people experiencing homelessness to tell their own story.
“Our census had two parts,” Soto explained. “One part was more objective, the other more subjective. The objective was more of the data, the count. The other was more to describe how homeless people live, work, those kinds of things. That second space was very important because we could get more issues answered about how we could manage the programs.”
That additional, biographical information was vital. “It makes a difference with the communication,” Soto continued. “We can tell everybody things like that one in four homeless people had grown up in orphanages or that 77% [of people experiencing homelessness] have incomes because they have some kind of work routine. The different surveys showed the different issues [people] have, the different needs. It showed that homelessness is a structural problem.”
Finding Solutions
Like all structural problems, Soto and Lacalle believe there are structural solutions. Both CalleLink and Nuestra Casa Corporación work to create and maintain networks that can strengthen the weakest links of a faulty structure. They want to strengthen the cooperation between NGOs and the Ministry of Social Development and to convince the government to take a more multi-tiered approach—coordinating not just with NGOs but with other government offices, like the health ministries. As is, the separation of responsibilities often leads to disjointed and haphazard policy.
As Soto put it: “We’re pushing the state … because they’re working too much to specialize all the efforts between different ministers, different services. [Under the 2011 government] they were the head and [the NGOs] were the body.”
One of the issues they often come up against is the argument that helping the vulnerable is a job for charitable organizations, not the government.
“We need one hundred years of hard work about this,” Soto said wryly. In the meantime, the Chilean government has begun to gear up for next year’s census, to check their progress addressing homelessness.
“The government made a promise to make changes,” Soto said, recalling the introduction to En Chile Todos Contamos. The results of the next census will show what progress they have made toward keeping it.
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