If some of us can sit in a prayer tent and go to worship concerts three nights in a row, why can’t we put the same time into actually making a difference?

“We know that housing alone will not solve homelessness, but we believe that community will,” Hinojosa said. “That is what is baked into our model.”

The Holistic Fair on Sept. 22, this year titled “Healing Harvest”, featured several small business teaming up to benefit The Phoenix Project, an organization with the goal of providing aid to the homeless.

In comparison to a school like the University of Texas at Austin, which regularly holds events to support the homeless community and has a social work program that collaborates with the city, it appears that Baylor is missing out on many opportunities.

Every Sunday since 1992, Jimmy Dorrell and Church Under the Bridge have been empowering people from all walks of life and redefining how to view homelessness and poverty.

“The Cove’s mission is about providing the after-school drop-in and outreach,” Dr. Timothy Packer, executive director of The Cove, said. “Our mission is to help young people in this transition from high school into post-high school. And what we know is that failing to graduate high school is one of the main contributing factors to why people experience homelessness as an adult, because it has so many knock-backs and consequences to future earnings, future health outcomes and continued instability in their life.”

No matter the job, everyone should be able to put food on the table and pay rent. It’s a matter of dignity and humanity.

“It’s not about passing money or giving out food, nothing like that,” Antonio said. “People don’t need that. They need love, they need that friendship. It’s scientifically proven.”

The city is rethinking conventional methods of helping the chronically homeless.

Rhonda Milem didn’t know that families who don’t have a place to live sometimes stay in the Sandman Motel on Franklin Avenue until she took a job at the Dollar General just down the street.

“I see a lot of kids come here after school,” she said.

Children and their families, living in the area, frequent the store where Milem works.

As part of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, today the McLennan County Hunger Coalition and the Heart of Texas Homeless Coalition are asking people to donate to an all-day food drive that will take place at multiple locations, such as H-E-B, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club locations.

The food will go to local food pantries.

Waco Independent School District counts homelessness like no other.

Last spring, the district became the first in the state to use a federally endorsed confidential information system to collect and pool information about students who are referred to social services.

The Homeless Management Information System, also known as Bowman System’s Service Point Software, was mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to correlate HUD funding to a more precise, statistical idea of who it actually helps, said Katie Fager, Waco HMIS program analyst.