ORANGE PARK – It’s too early for the birds, so it’s quiet.

The volunteers gather their belongings, water bottles and backpacks and grab clipboards. There’s more of them than organizers were expecting, so paper and clipboards are a commodity.

When the group parts way today, they will split into groups across the county to scour for homeless veterans in Orange Park and Green Cove Springs and areas near each city.

Wednesday marked the beginning of the nonprofit’s homeless veteran ‘surge,’ an effort to get an accurate headcount of homeless veterans in the area.

Organizers and volunteers, part of the Jacksonville-based nonprofit Changing Homelessness, hope, one day, they won’t have to survey anymore.

“We’re rapidly approaching functional zero,” said Michele Querry, director of community engagement and development for Changing Homelessness, referring to an industry term used to characterize a community in which the numbers of available beds for homeless veterans meet or exceed the current need.

“So what we want to ensure is that our data is reflective of what is actually going on on the streets. The streets don’t lie,” she said. “It’s also if we encounter people on the street – veterans or otherwise – that are ready for services, we want to make sure that we’re ready to provide those services.”

Volunteers handed out clean socks and hygiene kits Wednesday to the men and women they encountered and exchanged information about where they could get support services.

More often than not, the answer is – not in Clay County.

Clay County lacks a homeless shelter and its availability of affordable housing for county workers who live at, below, or just slightly above the poverty line.

Aside from negligible aid from churches and Clay nonprofits, there just isn’t much for the homeless in Clay County.

Additionally, police response to homelessness in the county encourages many to head for Duval County as well.

“They tell them they either have to leave, or they have to go to jail, and then they end up in Duval, because Duval isn’t as harsh as Clay County is,” said Todd Mays of the Sulzbacher Center, one of the partner agencies involved in Wednesday’s count.

Clay County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Angela Spears did not return calls with a comment on this story before deadline.

The idea is to scoop them out, Mays said. However, “From a homeless perspective, yes, they need somewhere to go, but from a regular community perspective, I guess some might see it as a threat, or something that brings down the neighborhood or the area.”

An availability of affordable housing and a plethora of nonprofits with appropriate funding have pushed Duval closer to having no veterans sleeping on the streets.

Wednesday morning, the workers focused on areas of urban sprawl such as retail stores and back alleyways on Blanding Boulevard, among other areas. Sixteen workers in total fanned out across the county.

Changing Homelessness will release the findings of its survey next month at an event at Jacksonville University.

The last official point-in-time homeless count Changing Homelessness performed in Clay County showed 84 unique homeless individuals who reside here – a slight jump from the year prior.

While the county hasn’t shown much interest in plans to fund services to homeless veterans or the chronically homeless, chances are it won’t run out of residents who are willing to wake up at 4 a.m. to volunteer anytime soon.

“There are far too many people in there that are in need,” said 25-year-old Frances Rijo of Orange Park. “I always wanted to volunteer, I know a lot of people say that, but just building up the courage to go out into unfamiliar places” was the most important part, she said. “That’s why.”