Our History

The DRC story began on a spring day in 1997, when bestselling author and former newspaper reporter Jeff Guinn stepped from a downtown bus station to spend a week living on the streets of Fort Worth. His harrowing, first-hand account of street life was published on June 8, 1997 and revealed heartbreaking gaps in help for the homeless. Guinn’s story opened eyes to the human cost of homelessness, and civic leaders responded, opening the DRC as Day Resource Center for the Homeless in 1999.

In 2015, the agency rebranded as the DRC to underscore its leadership in housing strategies for ending homelessness and its new mission: to provide respectful, responsible, and effective community-based solutions to help individuals and families emerge from homelessness as productive, healthy people. It exited shelter services in December 2016 to focus on housing solutions.

After managing the community’s overflow shelter during the COVID pandemic, the DRC discovered that many people living unsheltered were outside of the traditional service model in Tarrant County. In response, the DRC founded the Street Outreach program specifically to bring housing services to those living unsheltered.