Sandi Kelly has been homeless, several times. She figures she could be homeless again in the future.

But during the good times, when her life is in order and a roof is over her head, Kelly devotes herself to fixing homelessness in Lawrence.

“Someone like me, who has been through all this, can point these things out,” Kelly said last week. “I’m always at risk of being homeless again.”

As government officials and advocates for people who are homeless spent the winter in a Homeless Task Force, pondering what the city can do, Kelly hit the streets to find out what the people who are homeless think.

She talked to more than 50 people.

“I did sit down with some people that I knew, and a lot of people that I didn’t know,” Kelly said. “I am one of those people — that’s why they can talk to me.”

What the homeless want for themselves, she found, is what many people in the community want for them: affordable housing, methods to obtain and keep jobs, and access to mental and physical health care.

Steve Ozark, chairman of the Coalition of Homeless Concerns, praised Kelly’s survey, saying the city’s homeless must have a voice in solutions to the problem.

“I think we need to hear from the homeless community much more as we’re making these decisions,” Ozark said. “It’s certainly something I’m championing: talking to those who’ve experienced homelessness to get their insights.”

The insight, Kelly said, is that homelessness is a difficult trap to escape.

“Once you become homeless in Lawrence, it’s too difficult to get off the streets,” Kelly said at a town meeting on homelessness in early January at Trinity Lutheran Church. “That’s why people give up and turn to alcohol or drugs.”

Kelly, then, is the exception to the rule. Now 37, she came to Lawrence in 1991 after attending a Day on the Hill concert at Kansas University. Since then, she’s been through several bouts of homelessness, and said she had chronic mental illness.

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“I’ve been homeless several times in my life. I was a runaway, that kind of thing,” Kelly said. “I’ve fallen through the cracks a few times — I’ve been homeless or displaced six or seven times, always under different circumstances.”

People who are homeless, she said, need cheap housing — no more than $250 a month. They need a phone message service, so they can be in contact for jobs, housing and other services. They need transportation to work.

“We’re on the right track,” Kelly said. “But there are stopgap services that are needed if (A) people are going to get out of the streets and into housing … or (B) if you’re in a (housing) unit like I am, staying in the housing unit.”

Kelly doesn’t expect all the items on her list will come true. But she plans to keep working.

“I envision myself beating my head against the proverbial brick wall until some of it does,” Kelly said. “I think it can happen. I think it needs to happen.”