In the year of 2019 from December to March USC has been conducting a homeless count survey. The rational is to count the homeless people and take a survey on reasons for their homelessness for a giftcard incentive. However, not all gift cards are given to the indigent, some of them were looted and used by the staff.
And the staff fills out the forms as if a homeless person was counted. They refer themselves as volunteers, but in actuality they're getting paid to do the job, or cheat the system. None of the "volunteer" is real. They're all paid staff. But that's not the issue here.
This is more like funds thrown into thin air. There is no benefit from this campaign. Although many homeless people DO receive gift cards, still in my opinion it's very unfair to the skipped, suffering homeless people. The campaign never returns an accurate number of homeless individuals.
As we were brushing through homeless encampments more than half of the qualified homeless people were skipped and therefore the numbers must be seriously off. Or sometimes there's an empty tent, and a surveyor will fill out for the whole family to appropriate 2 gift cards instead of one.
There are supervisors (Layan & Nicole) that I wanted to report the issue to. However, their behavior was so arrogantly immature when I approached them, can't trust my confidentiality to them.
On their press release page https://pressroom.usc.edu/counting-l-a-s-homeless-usc-experts-explain-why/ the description of the program seems like it's a benevolent campaign. And it probably could be if some of what's said on that post was true and the staff were operating honestly. However, there are so many loopholes in the system that I witnessed about 50% of resources were appropreated by staff for their own personal use. They are gift cards and socks (so far).
I will continue working with them til the end and will update this post as I gather more information about the quixotic campaign.
University of Southern California Reviews
In the year of 2019 from December to March USC has been conducting a homeless count survey. The rational is to count the homeless people and take a survey on reasons for their homelessness for a giftcard incentive. However, not all gift cards are given to the indigent, some of them were looted and used by the staff.
And the staff fills out the forms as if a homeless person was counted. They refer themselves as volunteers, but in actuality they're getting paid to do the job, or cheat the system. None of the "volunteer" is real. They're all paid staff. But that's not the issue here.
This is more like funds thrown into thin air. There is no benefit from this campaign. Although many homeless people DO receive gift cards, still in my opinion it's very unfair to the skipped, suffering homeless people. The campaign never returns an accurate number of homeless individuals.
As we were brushing through homeless encampments more than half of the qualified homeless people were skipped and therefore the numbers must be seriously off. Or sometimes there's an empty tent, and a surveyor will fill out for the whole family to appropriate 2 gift cards instead of one.
There are supervisors (Layan & Nicole) that I wanted to report the issue to. However, their behavior was so arrogantly immature when I approached them, can't trust my confidentiality to them.
On their press release page https://pressroom.usc.edu/counting-l-a-s-homeless-usc-experts-explain-why/ the description of the program seems like it's a benevolent campaign. And it probably could be if some of what's said on that post was true and the staff were operating honestly. However, there are so many loopholes in the system that I witnessed about 50% of resources were appropreated by staff for their own personal use. They are gift cards and socks (so far).
I will continue working with them til the end and will update this post as I gather more information about the quixotic campaign.