The hallways at the Salvation Army emergency shelter are plastered with class schedules and sign-up lists. Spanish, cooking and computer classes are offered weekly to those hoping to find their way off the streets and into a home.

¢ Finding the way home (10-19-03)¢ Flash: Audio-visual presentation¢ More in this series¢Information on The Salvation Army¢The Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen

“We provide the means for people to help themselves,” said Rich Forney, shelter director.

“In the past few months we’ve had 26 people get full-time jobs and two get into college.”

The Salvation Army’s approach is simple. Those staying at the shelter are required to take at least nine classes per month and actively work to get into housing and get a job. If they don’t, they’re banned. Forney said the system was working.

“People need to be responsible for themselves,” he said.

Systemwide approach

The Salvation Army’s model may represent the future of the community’s response to homelessness. The city’s Homeless Services Task Force is considering a proposal to coordinate all of Lawrence’s responses to the problem of homelessness. It would require each person seeking food, shelter or treatment to undergo a personalized needs assessment.

“Now, people are being locked into homelessness,” said Jim Schneider, a member of the task force and the proposal’s author. “Supplying food and shelter without that therapeutic pull … is allowing people to stay on the street for more than six years.”

Schneider said the key to ending chronic homelessness was individualized attention and providing a wide array of services.

“It’s not one-size-fits-all,” Schneider said. “We want everyone to achieve their highest level of functioning.”

Relief vs. rehabilitation

Schneider said his model, the “rehabilitation model,” worked only if a community made a decision to link all homeless services to rehabilitation efforts.

“Most cities start with rehabilitation and relief agencies,” Schneider said. “If they have both models at the same time … one undercuts the other.”

The Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen would be considered a relief agency. Located in the basement of the First Christian Church, 1000 Ky., LINK provides free lunches for up to 150 people four times a week.

“It’s available to anyone,” said Becky Owens, LINK’s director.

Schneider said programs like LINK made it “easy” to be homeless by providing food without pulling people into treatment. He would like to see a monitoring system created, ensuring no one is fed without being seen by a caseworker.

But Owens said such monitoring could be a big mistake.

Donna Schlaman and her husband, Phil, Lawrence, prepare a meal for the Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen. The Schlamans are LINK volunteers from Plymouth Congregational Church. A homeless task force member has criticized LINK for making it easy to be homeless by providing free meals without requiring people to seek treatment or training.

“I think we would see a decrease in the number of guests,” Owens said. “A lot of times people don’t want to be rehabilitated.”

Owens said it would be extremely difficult to make a rehabilitative model work. Providing an individualized plan for every person on the streets would require too many case managers and would face resistance from the clients the plans are designed to serve.

Middle ground?

Across the street from LINK, Tami Clark runs the Community Drop-In Center, another relief agency. The center provides a safe place for people who are homeless to do laundry, use the phone, and look for work. Clark said Schneider’s plan had some good points, but a pure rehabilitative approach was impractical.

“Part of that system is if you don’t like it, you have to leave,” Clark said. “Is it solving homelessness to push people down the road to Topeka?”

Clark said her agency had tried to provide more employment and housing counseling, but there would always be a need for free and open access to services.

“I would love to work myself out of a job,” Clark said. “There are so many little cracks between agencies.”

Schneider said the goal of a rehabilitative approach was to fill in those cracks, but he admitted the model had its problems.

“How to deal with an unmotivated, highly functional person, that’s a question we’d have to answer,” Schneider said. “But first we’ve got to try.”

Listening to clients

Response to the proposal among the homeless population has been mixed. Chris Collins, who was homeless for 14 months before using a rent assistance program to find an apartment, said he approved of parts of the proposal.

“I’m fortunate I never felt placated by the services which were available to me,” said Collins, who suffers from severe depression. He said working closely with a case manager was essential to his finding his way off the streets.

“Working on a one-on-one basis is key,” Collins said.

Barbara Hogue, who has lived in her van the past eight months, says a rehabilitative model would be challenged among homeless people with drug or alcohol problems.

“It’s not always a choice,” Hogue said. “Why keep them on the streets (if they refuse treatment)?”

Recommendations

Task force chairman and Vice Mayor Mike Rundle said the proposal was only a starting point for discussion and would face considerable revision before being submitted to the City Commission. He said he agreed with Schneider’s call for a communitywide response to homelessness, but said that response probably would not be a strict rehabilitative model.

“There’s a surprising consensus on the task force … for a ‘compassionate rehabilitative’ model,” Rundle said.

Rundle said the city must first eliminate duplicated services and ensure all the homeless population’s needs were being met, without the community turning its back on anyone.