Volunteers seek out Austin's homeless for point in time count
Volunteers prepare to count Austin's homeless
Around 600 volunteers to go to Travis County's homeless communities to distribute care kits and collect demographic data and part of the Point in Time count Sunday morning.
AUSTIN, Texas - Volunteers will hit the streets Sunday to conduct a survey of the homeless population in Austin and Travis County.
The Point in Time Count happens every two years and volunteers from the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition go into the community to conduct and in-person survey of homeless people.
Big picture view:
The Point in Time survey is required to occur every two years by the federal government.
The results are sent to the Housing and Urban Development's Continuum of Care Program and is used to distribute funding.
The agency collects the data from across the country to generate an estimate of national homelessness and sends that information to Congress to help guide policy decisions.
Local perspective:
ECHO will use 600 volunteers to conduct the surveys through out Austin and Travis County.
Those volunteers spent their Saturday at the Trinity Center preparing for the count.
ECHO has split the area into three sections: central, suburban and rural.
The volunteers will attempt to make contact with homeless persons, including those living in cars, tents or abandoned buildings.
They'll look to provide a snapshot of the demographics of homeless people on a single night.
What they're saying:
ECHO's Director of Operations Angela de Leon says the count isn't possible without the volunteers.
"It's a huge undertaking. And every year that we do it, we need hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, and we can't do it without them. We're covering about 1100 square miles to get the entire city and county," de Leon said.
But the organization doesn't just perform a count.

"We're giving them care kits, which has a lot of different hygiene products and just goods that you would want no matter what. So those get handed out along with a resource guide, and then hopefully they'll answer some questions for a survey and that surveys will helps us determine the scale of the crisis of homelessness locally," de Leon said.
Sunday will be the third time Claire Burris has volunteered.
"As a volunteer, I've had a really positive experience getting to know some of my unhoused neighbors," Burris said. "I'm leading a section that's in southwest Austin, not far from where I live, and I feel like it's a way for me to get to know my unhoused neighbors and get a sense of what's going on in the community just outside the fences of our neighborhood."
The count begins at 3 a.m. Sunday and goes until 9 a.m.
You can find more information here: Home - ECHO
The Source: Information in this article comes from interviews by FOX 7's Jenna King.