McKINNEY (WBAP & KLIF News) — The Collin County Homeless Coalition held a summit Wednesday to bring together businesses, faith-based organizations, school districts and homeless shelters to help assist the homeless in Collin County.
It’s not a county typically associated with a heavy homeless population. But Plano City Councilman Rick Grady says in three of the county’s school districts, there are about 1,800 kids either “sofa-surfing,” which he described as living on friends couches, or on the streets.
“The community has a perception that Collin County is very well-off and that homeless people don’t live in our streets,” Grady said. “But they do.”
The coalition’s chairman says there could be hundreds more homeless people in Collin County they don’t even know of, making it more important for organizations to communicate to make it easier to help them.
“You can’t address an issue if you don’t have help and support from a number of different groups,” said McKinney Mayor Brian Loughmiller.
The goal of Wednesday’s summit — their first as a county — was for the different groups to network and communicate with each other what each can provide. That way, according to Grady, when a homeless family goes to a church or visits a shelter, they can easily communicate with other organizations about how to adequately help them.
“That’s really the significance of the event,” Grady said. “To begin to make the invisible visible.”
