Just two years ago, it seemed the Lawrence Coalition for Homeless Concerns was dead.

The group got started in the 1990s as a means for the city’s homeless residents to make their voices heard. But the coalition was never well organized, and gradually fizzled out.

Gary Miller is president of the Lawrence Coalition for Homeless Concerns. He is employed at Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center, 200 Maine.

In the spring and summer of 2000, things changed.

John Lowe, 38, was sleeping in an alley near the then-Community Mercantile store when a car hit him and dragged his body around the corner to Mississippi and Ninth streets, killing him, on April 28, 2000. A Missouri man was later convicted of killing Lowe while driving under the influence of alcohol.

A few months later, a second homeless person died. Rita Clark, 47, died of exposure Aug. 15, 2000, under the Kansas River Bridge.

Gary Miller, then the homeless outreach specialist for the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center, got a call after Clark’s death from an advocate for the homeless.

“She said, ‘This can’t happen again,'” Miller said. “I said, ‘I agree. What can we do?'”

That conversation sparked the coalition’s rebirth this time with a different look. Homeless people still attend the monthly meetings, but now social workers like Miller gather with their colleagues and government officials to determine plans of action.

“It was originally envisioned as a place for homeless people to speak about their own needs.” said Saunny Scott, a longtime advocate for the homeless in Lawrence. Now “it’s much more a professionals-coming-together organization.”

More effective

The result, observers say, has been a more effective organization. And many give Miller, now in his second term as coalition president, credit for the turnaround.

“I think it’s good leadership,” said Margene Swarts, the city’s community development manager. “Gary’s helped put people in a position where they can move toward meeting a goal instead of just talking about how things would be in a perfect world.”

Miller said the coalition has benefited from increased community interest in homelessness.

“In the past, that component wasn’t there,” he said. “I think the community’s really what has made it come together.”

That cohesiveness helped spark a particularly active year by the coalition. During the summer, it worked with St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church to provide the first summertime shelter in recent memory the air-conditioned gymnasium at the church’s school offered relief from the heat for the homeless and those too poor to have a working air conditioner.

“There was one day we were hotter than the Mojave Desert,” Miller said. “People need to get out of the heat.”

Agency competition

About the same time, coalition members launched a lobbying campaign to convince the city commission of the need for a year-round shelter in Lawrence. For a month, different members used the public comment time at commission meetings to ask for city action.

That campaign resulted in commissioners voting to approve extra money to help the Salvation Army’s winter shelter open early but it is expected to close April 21.

Now coalition members want to move to the task of establishing a permanent, year-round shelter.

“We’re closer now than we have been,” Miller said. “There’s still some barriers, some work to be done.”

One of those barriers might be the battle between agencies for support. The Salvation Army is still trying to find a location for a permanent year-round shelter, and a multimillion dollar fund-raising campaign will be needed. Meanwhile, Lawrence Open Shelter popped up in 2001 with the stated intention of creating its own year-round shelter one that, unlike the Salvation Army, would admit intoxicated persons.

Miller downplayed the divisiveness.

“It’s definitely not a barrier to progress,” he said.

In the long term, Miller and others hope to build a “safety net” for the city’s poor and homeless, offering the mentally ill and substance abusers alternatives to living on the street.

“There needs to be some kind of way to help people who are in jeopardy, especially with the working poor getting” more numerous, he said.

It will take time, however. And some coalition members say that, while progress is coming more quickly than before, it’s still not fast enough.

“I wish it was moving faster,” Scott said. “Unfortunately, coalitions move slowly.”