The Philadelphia Resilience Project hosted its third successful large-scale community cleanup on Saturday, January 19. The cold weather wasn’t enough to stop over 160 volunteers from coming out on a Saturday morning to clean 125 blocks around Conwell and Willard Schools – helping to create a safer and cleaner environment for children in the neighborhood. The next major cleanup is in the planning process and is tentatively scheduled for March 9, 2019.
This week, the City continued to move forward with preparations for the closure of the Emerald St. encampment on January 31. This will be the last of the four major encampments in the neighborhood to be closed. The Police Assisted Diversion Program will be on hand to offer social service referrals to the people living in the encampment. The Police Department has also planned an initiative to remove hundreds of abandoned vehicles in Kensington from February 1-3 to coincide with the Emerald St. encampment closure.
On the evening of January 23, the Office of Homeless Services (OHS) hosted a Point-in-Time Count to help measure street homelessness in neighborhoods across Philadelphia, including Kensington. OHS coordinated with the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, Project HOME, and Valley Youth House to complete the count. OHS reports the results of the count to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will be publicly available in early March.
