Volunteers fanned out Thursday for a bureaucratic ritual known as the point-in-time count of homeless people in Central Oregon.

From remote camps to motels and shelters to localized headquarters in various cities, the one-day effort seeks to quantify the number of people living without homes of their own.

“The purpose is to identify what the needs are in the community,” said Kenny LaPoint of Housing Works, a private, nonprofit contractor that manages public housing. “It gives us an ability to understand that need and number as nonprofits and public agencies when we go out and apply for funding.”

The one-day count is a mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he said. Despite the wide range of publicly funded services made available based on its results, the count is a largely volunteer effort undertaken by community-based groups, LaPoint said.

One of those groups, Central Oregon Veterans Outreach, heads up the effort to reach remote homeless camps, where often a majority of occupants are veterans. COVO manages programs locally for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, an agency that once held itself aloof from grassroots agencies helping the homeless population, said COVO Executive Director Allison Perry.

That mind-set has changed under Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, the former U.S. Army chief of staff, Perry said. Under Shinseki, she said, the VA is part of a community effort.

“The reason COVO is spearheading the outreach in the field and the supply-drop mission (is), we have a history of going out in the camps and we know the terrain,” Perry said.

Volunteers taking part in the count in some cases passed out tents, groceries and other donated supplies. The numbers gathered help support VA programs that find homeless veterans shelter or get them into transitional housing or help them find jobs.

Other aspects of the one-day count, which is organized by the Central Oregon Homeless Leadership Coalition, include setting up “command centers” around Deschutes County.

The command centers are places where people without homes or in transitional housing — temporary shelters, staying with friends or family or sleeping in vehicles — can go for medical attention, a hot meal or donated supplies. A church, Central Oregon Community College, Bend’s Community Center and a food bank in Sisters, for example, served as command centers.

Thursday evening, LaPoint said, volunteers would knock on doors at motels or check with managers to verify that some tenants were staying there for want of permanent shelter. They also receive information from local homeless shelters on the number of people staying there Thursday.

“It’s pretty efficient in our region. There’s a lot of people that don’t get counted, still,” he said.

Once the information is collected, the numbers are broken into data sets: the number of homeless children under age 18 and the number of those still enrolled in school, for example.

The 2012 count turned up 2,132 people who identified themselves as homeless, according to the coalition. Close to half, or 43 percent, of homeless families included children under age 18. That means over 800 children under 18 without homes, and more than 600 of them still attending school.

The count is an important resource, LaPoint said, and sometimes a challenge in January weather. Thursday was a fairly mild day, winter-wise, but that’s not always so. Still, the count goes on.

“If we didn’t do it, we would hurt,” he said.