Various agencies that work with the homeless population met today at the Salvation Army to roll out a new program called Coordinated Entry.
"It’s a big step towards eradicating homelessness in the coastal bend area," said Capt. Patrick Gesner from the Salvation Army.
The plan is simple and based in an existing program that is used in other cities nationwide.
Instead of people showing up and possible staying for days in various shelters, they are interviewed and then referred to a shelter that deals with their individual circumstance.
"For example if someone is struggling for drug and alcohol addiction the salvation army here is not the location that deals with that Charlie’s place or one of the other institutions would be better for that," said Gesner.
And studies showed that the salvation army was the best place to coordinated this.
Leticia Kanmore from city of cc says an organized system like this makes a lot of sense, "with the Salvation Army taking the lead its great its going to centralize homeless services, and so where the referrals are going to be more bottle necked and streamlined."
And Mark Cason, who works with the areas veterans agrees, "to me the veteran population homelessness in cc is very very high and we need to do a lot more with our resources working together to make sure we have less homeless veterans."
Gesner added, "the beauty of that is once we enter that into he system they will get that information and we will be able to make the referral real quickly and share resources and information so much better than we have in the last 10 years."
