Over 1,100 guests filled the hall at the Hilton Anatole Hotel to hear the Mayor and to pray for our city. The Mayor challenged us all to engage more actively in the battle to overcome poverty and to craft a high quality of life for every resident of Dallas.

You can read about the event in The Dallas Morning News' report from last Friday morning right here...

Dallas mayor urges businesses to fight homelessness

To grow physically and spiritually, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said Thursday the city must embrace the needs of its most vulnerable residents – particularly the homeless – and not leave them behind while those stronger thrive.

“To progress together, we need to understand the needs of others,” Mr. Leppert said during a keynote address before about 1,000 people at the Urban Ministries Prayer Breakfast at Dallas’ Hilton Anatole hotel.

Economic constraints, such as limited housing options and high gasoline prices, remain barriers to the homeless engaging in mainstream society, Mr. Leppert said.

But Dallas is poised to significantly improve homeless residents’ lives through the opening this spring of a new downtown homeless assistance center, the mayor explained. Mr. Leppert also said he envisions the creation of a $20 million housing trust fund that could be included in the city’s next public works bond package. Top city staffers project placing such a package before voters within three or four years.

The public sector, however, can only provide so much funding, Mr. Leppert said.

“The private sector must step up,” Mr. Leppert said. “Government can’t do everything and shouldn’t do everything. It should set a foundation, it should set priorities.”

To that point, the mayor called on area businesses to support, through word and checkbook, efforts combating homelessness and its root causes. General investments in Dallas will also create a stronger economic climate benefiting the entire community.

“Investments are, at their heart, a belief that we can create opportunities,” said Mr. Leppert, a career businessman and self-made millionaire who often crafts his political messages in economic terms.

But this morning, he stood before the crowd as part preacher and part politician.

Quoting Mother Teresa, Mr. Leppert said that the good one does today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway, he implored.

“In the end, it is between you and God,” he said.

Supporters hail Mr. Leppert’s ideas for reducing homelessness as at once compassionate and realistic.

But some homeless advocates have derided as callous one particular program Mr. Leppert strongly advocates: the Lend a Hand campaign (pdf brochure here), which calls on Dallasites to resist giving panhandlers money.

Instead, the campaign recommends, drop pocket change in any of several dozen lock boxes provided throughout the downtown area. Backers call it a vehicle for better supporting organizations dedicated to helping the homeless...

(By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News)