National experts:
Keri Buscaglia is Director Communications for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. She is responsible for all press inquiries. Organization’s website, which contains a lot of information, can be accessed here.
Rosanne Haggerty is President and CEO of Community Solutions, a group that works with communities to develop plans to end homelessness. You tube video of Haggerty is linked here.
Donald Burnes is a scholar and expert on homelessness. He is currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Denver, researching and publishing in the area of solutions to homelessness. He is also working with the city of Denver to implement workable solutions.
Barbara Poppe founded the consulting firm, Barbara Poppe and Associates, to help communities plan coordinated approaches to reduce/end homelessness. She previously worked with U.S. Intra-agency Council for Homelessness and is a nationally recognized expert.
Local individuals/experts/possible sources:
Rob Trevena is Director’s of Athens’ Housing and Community Development and as such is involved with funding for homeless assistance grants. Applications for the coming year are currently being collected. As an additional note, it was reported in the Banner-Herald just today that Mr. Trevena has announced his retirement.
Samantha Carralho works for Athens’ Housing and Community Development and is responsible for coordinating the yearly counts of homeless individuals
R. Scott Freeman is Chief of Police of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department. It may be helpful at some point to get information or perspectives from the police department about a matter related to panhandling or the homeless.
Pamela Thompson (on Athens Area Chamber of Commerce website) is Executive Director of Athens Downtown Development Authority Board. Ways to reducing panhandling, particularly aggressive panhandling, have recently been discussed (with little progress made).
Zack Leitz is a UGA student (Terry College of Business) who founded the Backpack Project, a group that puts items useful to those living on the street into new backpacks and delivers them to homeless individuals on the streets of Athens. Tony, the homeless man I interviewed, spoke about how much this meant to him.
Rachel Deese is one of three individuals (the others being Erik Olsen and Michael Russo) who founded PBJ’s, a group that brings bagged lunches to homeless individuals on the streets of Athens every Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. An important part of their mission is also to socialize with people on the street. This group and their fellowship was also mentioned by the individual I talked to.