The Dallas Area Partnership to End and Prevent Homelessness was established to address the worsening epidemic of homelessness throughout Dallas County.
The partnership was put in place “as a collaborative structure to address ending homelessness from the broader community perspective, identify priorities, establish alignment, and bring resources to bear from many sources: federal, state, local, and private sectors.”
County Commissioner Theresa Daniel serves as the chair of the partnership, with City Councilmember Casey Thomas II serving as vice chair.
According to a three-year strategic plan for the partnership developed in 2018, the partnership aims to provide “overarching system leadership” and coordinate community responses to homelessness in the Dallas area.
The partnership is one of several organizations responsible for addressing homelessness and vagrancy throughout Dallas. Others include the Citizen Homelessness Commission, the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee, and the City of Dallas’ Office of Homeless Solutions.
On Thursday, Mayor Eric Johnson announced a team meant to recommend “concrete solutions” to the City to reduce homelessness — a task force on Homelessness Organizations, Policies, and Encampments (HOPE), as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
Commissioner Daniel told The Dallas Express she looks forward to seeing how the mayor’s new task force fits in with the other ongoing efforts against homelessness throughout the Dallas area.
When asked whether the partnership will collaborate with the mayor’s new task force, she said, “To me, that’s the only way it makes sense.”
On the same day as the mayor’s announcement, the Dallas Area Partnership to End and Prevent Homelessness appointed two new members: Balch Springs Police Chief Brent Hurley and Dallas ISD Trustee Dan Micciche.
As a Dallas ISD school board member now sits on this anti-homelessness partnership, the school system is under fire from parents who are furious about a homeless and vagrant encampment being set up behind Arcadia Park Elementary School, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“Since they started to clean up the freeway, they’re starting to push them this way more,” said a parent identified as Jay by NBC 5. “During the night … I see them with their grocery carts full of their stuff, and they cut through the school parking lot, and they go through the back of the dumpsters of the library.”
Local mother Daily Ocha also told NBC 5, “I think it was Wednesday when [my twins] … told me that the homeless guy that lives in the back, that he was staring at them and that he told them to go where he was.”
These developments occur in the midst of rising homelessness and vagrancy throughout Dallas, despite the Office of Homeless Solutions having an annual budget of $15 million to address this “scourge,” as Mayor Johnson has called it.
Polling conducted by The Dallas Express shows that most residents believe homelessness and vagrancy are serious problems in Dallas.
While various Dallas entities, including both public commissions and private nonprofits, continue to fight against homelessness and vagrancy, one solution that has yet to be tried in the area is the “one-stop shop” model of Haven for Hope in San Antonio.
This approach, which aims to provide streamlined services to the homeless in a single geographic location, is highly favored by Dallas residents.