With a fresh heap of snow sticking to the ground, Christy O’Brien and a team of volunteers bundle up and head to Hope for Holyoke, a substance abuse recovery and support center in the heart of the city’s downtown. Here, they start the night by approaching a handful of unhoused people camped outside.

“We’re on a mission tonight,” O’Brien told CommonWealth Beacon in an interview.

That mission is to ensure that anyone experiencing homelessness in the city is counted.

As the temperature slowly drops to zero degrees, volunteers ask where the individuals will be sleeping tonight. Some say they don’t know, while others say they will be “walking” instead of sleeping – something many homeless people do during the brutal winter months when they can’t get warm enough to rest or fear they will be kicked out of an area in the middle of the night.

The volunteers hand out bags of food, toiletries, and other small necessities as those individuals set out to wander the streets for the rest of the night. Holyoke’s only homeless shelter – totaling 46 beds – has been full for months, and without funding for additional shelter beds this winter, there are few places for the unhoused to go. Even in nearby cities, beds aren’t available.

“Shelters have been full since the summer, which is pretty unprecedented for all of this area,” O’Brien, homelessness service line director for the Center for Human Development in Western Massachusetts, said. “We have way more referrals than we can ever manage. We are turning people away.”

On January 28, just days after a severe winter storm hit Massachusetts, local volunteers across the state set out to quantify homelessness in their communities. The Point-in-Time, or PIT, count is conducted across the country on a single night in January every year. This one-night snapshot – first held in 2005 – is the only federally required count of all people experiencing homelessness in the United States.

On the night of the count, homeless people are counted in two categories – sheltered and unsheltered.

Holyoke has one of the highest unsheltered counts in the state and had the highest unsheltered count in all of Hampden County this year, according to preliminary numbers. Last year, 82 unsheltered people were counted in Holyoke, the highest number ever recorded in the city at the time. This year, that number was 89.