Pine Street Inn, Boston’s largest provider of shelters to the homeless was faced with a reduction in the level funding from $29.6 million in 2003 to $26.9 million in 2004. In the past, Pine Street made up the short comings in its funding by seeking charitable donations. Lyndia Downie, the executive director of Pine Street, knew that this wasn’t a sustainable strategy due to the increasing population of Boston’s homeless. In order to better understand how long guests were staying, Pine Street started collecting data which most of the content in the paragraphs below is based off of.
The average length of stay for a guest at the Pine Street Inn was 26.2 nights. This parameter is greatly skewed by a relatively small number of guests (4%) staying …show more content…
For example, we can’t tell if the same guest visited multiple times. If this is the case, this could actually skew number of guests who stayed 3 nights or less. A better way to more accurately log this data would be to assign each guest a unique guest number, and log total nights stayed to that specific guest number. Another limitation to this data is that its unclear what time period this information was gathered. With the maximum stay being 727 nights, its safe to assume this data was gathered over at least a 2-year period. It’s also interesting to point out that this data does not account for seasonal changes in bed demand. If there was an additional column of information highlighting the dates of stay, this would further help to determine peak seasons for the use of the beds. The final limitation I’ll comment on about the data is that it doesn’t identify which of the 5 shelter a guest stayed at.
A short term recommendation to provide budget relief would be to put a cap on the number of days a guest can stay at the Pine Street Inn as the data shows the vast majority of the bed nights are consumed by a small amount of guests (Appendix A, Appendix B). A more long term recommendations for Pine Street is to start collecting data on the dates each guest stayed and which shelter they stayed at. This could highlight seasonal opportunities to save money on the emergency shelter budget by cutting staff hours at certain locations while
The average length of stay for a guest at the Pine Street Inn was 26.2 nights. This parameter is greatly skewed by a relatively small number of guests (4%) staying …show more content…
For example, we can’t tell if the same guest visited multiple times. If this is the case, this could actually skew number of guests who stayed 3 nights or less. A better way to more accurately log this data would be to assign each guest a unique guest number, and log total nights stayed to that specific guest number. Another limitation to this data is that its unclear what time period this information was gathered. With the maximum stay being 727 nights, its safe to assume this data was gathered over at least a 2-year period. It’s also interesting to point out that this data does not account for seasonal changes in bed demand. If there was an additional column of information highlighting the dates of stay, this would further help to determine peak seasons for the use of the beds. The final limitation I’ll comment on about the data is that it doesn’t identify which of the 5 shelter a guest stayed at.
A short term recommendation to provide budget relief would be to put a cap on the number of days a guest can stay at the Pine Street Inn as the data shows the vast majority of the bed nights are consumed by a small amount of guests (Appendix A, Appendix B). A more long term recommendations for Pine Street is to start collecting data on the dates each guest stayed and which shelter they stayed at. This could highlight seasonal opportunities to save money on the emergency shelter budget by cutting staff hours at certain locations while