Several local agencies will meet Tuesday to hold a forum on homelessness, discussing ways to combat the problem of chronic homelessness and to ensure that the issue is not overlooked by the general public.

The forum will be 11 a.m. Tuesday at The Tomorrow Center, 1133 Adams St., and is being sponsored by Housing Assistance and Development Services.

HANDS Executive Director Deborah Williams said the forum has a twofold purpose - to bring together agencies that provide services to area homeless people to develop a regional strategy to end homelessness, and to discuss the 2008 Homeless Point in Time Count, a sort of census of the area’s homeless population.

“You can’t overlook the fact that there are people living in cars in Bowling Green, Ky.,” Williams said. “There are people living in vacant buildings and under bridges. We want to get all the agencies on the same page to really focus on this issue.”

Recovery Kentucky, a 10-year statewide plan unveiled in 2005 to end chronic homelessness, has as its major aim to reduce drug dependency, which the plan links with homelessness.

A survey conducted in January 2005 determined there were 19,141 homeless individuals in the state, with 2,470 of them classified as chronically homeless - suffering from a disabling condition and having been continuously homeless for a year or more, or having had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.

Williams said the local Homeless Point in Time Count will be conducted from midnight to 11:59 p.m. Jan. 24, with volunteers and law enforcement personnel combing over the county and visiting shelters to get an accurate count of homeless people in the area.

Community Action of Southern Kentucky, The Medical Center, Barren River Area Safe Space and the Bowling Green Police Department are some of the agencies that will be represented either at the forum or during the count.

Lee Alcott, executive director of BRASS, said having an accurate count of the local homeless population would affect how the region addresses the problem.

“Those numbers are sent to federal Housing and Urban Development with the potential impact of affecting funding for housing resources in Kentucky,” Alcott said. “This also helps to increase public awareness of the problem of homelessness in Warren County.”