Homelessness is a year-round problem, but it intensifies this time of year with fewer hours of daylight and winter closing in.

For some of the more than 8,000 individuals without stable housing in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties forced to shelter in vehicles, alleys and encampments, wintertime can prove fatal.

That’s where Menlo Park-based charity LifeMoves steps in.

LifeMoves, formerly known as InnVision Shelter Network, is a 44-year-old nonprofit that specializes in getting individuals into temporary housing and on a path to permanent housing. It claims a 93 percent success rate of getting homeless families housed and self-sufficient, and a 72 percent success rate with individuals. There is just one caveat: People who receive assistance — referred to as clients — must demonstrate a willingness to better themselves.

“We’re here to help people who are taking steps to help themselves” is how the charity puts it.

For one client, a man with a series of disabilities including paralysis to his left side, homelessness became a life-or-death issue after living on the streets for nearly five years.

“If it wasn’t for this agency here, I would have froze to death out there,” said Kenneth Francis Edge, who spent 7½ months recovering from pneumonia and two debilitating viruses at UCSF Medical Center after sheltering in alleys in San Francisco last winter without warm clothing.

He said he became homeless following a divorce that left him without savings. He moved in with a sister in San Jose but hit the streets again after finding out she was addicted to drugs and was stealing from him. Other homeless people stole his backpacks, mobile phones and sleeping bags.

After learning about LifeMoves, he continued to live on the streets while using the charity’s Opportunity Services Center in Palo Alto, where he got free showers, meals, clothing, use of a locker, the site’s mailing address, and counseling and educational services.

Edge just moved into a nine-bedroom house in Los Gatos two weeks ago, where he is on an annual lease and lives with other formerly homeless roommates. LifeMoves helped him acquire a federal voucher that pays the bulk of his rent and Edge pays the remainder out of his monthly disability benefits.

So new is housing to him that “my key is in my sock so I don’t lose it,” Edge said.

LifeMoves just celebrated acquiring permanent housing for 100 clients this past year. Many of these homeless individuals used its Hotel de Zink program, in which 12 churches (11 in Palo Alto and one in Menlo Park) partner with the charity to house up to 20 individuals for 30 days at a time on a rotating basis. This month, as in past Novembers, is Menlo Church’s turn.

Hotel de Zink runs from 6 p.m to 7 a.m. every day of the year, providing clients with mattresses, sheets, blankets, meals, clothing and a truck with shower facilities parked outside.

“The faith-based community has been invaluable in helping LifeMoves provide critical services for homeless families and individuals,” said Brian Greenberg, the charity’s vice president of programs and services, adding that two to three Hotel de Zink clients receive permanent housing in a typical month.

That frees up space in the program, which usually has a waiting list, particularly this time of year. Hotel de Zink is named after Howard Zink, a Palo Alto police chief during the Great Depression and ardent supporter of a shelter that a resident named Mable Glover convinced the city to fund and open in November 1931 on the Federal Telegraph Co. property where the Sheraton Hotel now stands.

Clients are generally housed for up to 90 days while the charity works with them to find permanent housing, but they can receive extensions.

Sandra Medina, 54, is one such case, now in her fourth month staying at Hotel de Zink. She had been homeless for a year, after she and her ailing mother she was caring for could no longer afford rent. A sister took in their mother, but there wasn’t enough room for her, she said.

LifeMoves is helping Medina get a part-time clerical job, work she is familiar with, as well as a studio apartment. Along with the county’s Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, the charity helped Medina, who is bipolar, receive regular psychiatric services and medication. She also suffers from congestive heart failure.

“I started with nothing and now I have everything I need, thank God and thank LifeMoves,” she said, adding that she was scared at first to come to Hotel de Zink because she had witnessed fights and thefts at previous shelters.

Medina said she has made a number of friends in the past months. “I meet people that are in the same situation that I am in and that have positive attitudes. … We wish for the best for each other. It’s like a family-type thing.”

All clients start out at the Opportunity Services Center, which is the charity’s drop-in site. Philip Dah, the center’s senior director, said most homeless people in the two-county area find out by word of mouth that they can come to the center, which operates from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, for basic services and, in wintertime, a safe place to get out of the cold.

Dah said most of the roughly 100 people on average who use the site each day don’t know at first that LifeMoves can help them find housing. But, before first-timers receive any assistance, they are entered into the system and assessed by one of four case managers, in part to make sure they can handle a social setting.

Dah calls it a “carrot and stick approach” that begins the process toward permanent housing in nearly every case. For instance, a client has to be working on a plan out of homelessness with a case manager to receive access to a locker.

“It starts off where they don’t know anybody and all they want is shower and food,” he said. “Then we introduce them to other services. … They don’t want to go talk to a case manager or are numb from not receiving help at other places, but we say, if you’re coming here, you need to do this.”

LifeMoves also provides emergency assistance to people who are in danger of losing housing or have recently lost an apartment due to a hardship such as loss of a job. For the chronically homeless — those who have experienced homelessness at least four times in the past year, which represents half of clients — the charity provides bus passes so they can get to and from the Opportunity Services Center to Hotel de Zink or other temporary housing facilities and to their jobs.

Some homeless clients have full-time jobs, such as Richard Hall, who works as a cook at a Whole Foods in the South Bay. He was housed for roughly five years in one of the 88 residences above the Opportunity Services Center, but had to leave because he lost a job, couldn’t pay the rent and was too embarrassed to ask for assistance while he searched for new employment.

He said he has no problem finding a job, but often struggles to maintain it.

“I deal with my stress kind of funny,” Hall said.

After leaving the area for his former hometown of Vacaville and ending up on the streets for about a year, he is back at Hotel de Zink. LifeMoves is working on getting him into an 18-month transitional housing program in which he can save up money for permanent housing as long as he keeps his job, perhaps out of the Bay Area where rent is cheaper.

“I’m feeling pretty strong about things,” said Hall, adding that his current job, which he’s had for a month, isn’t stressing him out.