For months and even years now, community leaders have discussed the need for a wholistic comprehensive approach to the problem of homelessness, and, on Monday, Nov. 14, the leaders behind that effort announced a series of meetings for a new task force that’s designed to address the problem that’s become more and more prevalent in recent years.

The Guilford County Homelessness Taskforce held its inaugural meeting on Thursday, Nov. 10, and, at that time, taskforce members adopted their regular meeting schedule for the remainder of 2022 and the first part of calendar year 2023.

The county’s task force was created after Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston attended a meeting of community organizations and local government leaders who were attempting to address homelessness.

Following that meeting, Alston said it was clear that everyone was doing their own thing without much coordination – however, Alston said, the solution requires everyone being on the same page.

Alston also noted that it was senseless to deal with homelessness without attempting to address root causes such as mental health issues, substance abuse problems and other large contributors to the problem of homelessness.

The task force has a lot of work ahead and it has now released a schedule of the planned meetings, though the locations of many future meetings are yet to be determined.

The first meeting of the Homelessness Task Force will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 30 in the large third-floor conference room of the Truist Building at 201 W. Market Street in Greensboro.

The other meetings, all at 4 p.m., will take place on December 21, 2022, January 11, 2023, followed by meetings on February 1, February 22, March 15 and April 5.

Those who plan to attend the meetings should check Guilford County’s legal notice webpage for updates to the schedule later once meeting locations are finalized. That information will be found at https://legalnotices.guilfordcountync.gov/Default.aspx.

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