Around 8:30 tonight, between 35 and 45 people – all of them homeless – will be lined up outside the Salvation Army shelter.

At 9, the door will open. One by one, they’ll be tested for alcohol. Those who haven’t been drinking will spend the night. The others will find shelter elsewhere.

A light meal will be served between 9:15 and 9:30, followed by some cleanup chores and staking out sleeping space on the gym floor. At 10:30, it’s lights out.

“We are here to meet the needs of the needy,” said Rich Forney, who oversees the Salvation Army’s operations in Lawrence.

The Salvation Army has been helping Lawrence’s poor since 1886.

“We will always be here,” said Lawrence attorney Dick Zinn, who’s been on the Salvation Army’s advisory board since 1971.

But as the city’s homeless numbers increase while budgets get tighter and tighter, Salvation Army officials say they can’t keep doing what they’ve always done.

Hank receives food from Salvation Army food coordinator Patti Gallup, center, and volunteer Katricia Clark during lunch Friday. The Salvation Army provides lunch Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in addition to dinners for those spending the night at the shelter seven days a week.

Always scrambling to meet short-term demands, they say, won’t lead to long-term solutions.

“Is it really helping someone to give them a plate of food and a safe place to lay down?” asked Forney. “It gets them through another day, but what does that truly accomplish when they’re still homeless when they get up in the morning?”

New approach

The Salvation Army is changing its approach to helping the homeless.

Two years ago, it began requiring shelter dwellers to take at least nine one-hour self-improvement classes a month. They also have to meet with case managers who will help them come up with a plan for getting a job, saving some money, and getting a place of their own.

For some, this is enough.

“We helped over 100 people get jobs last year and move out – some of these were families, so it’s really more than 100 people,” Forney said.

Others need more. So when the Salvation Army gets around to building its new facility near 19th Street and Haskell Avenue – public fund raising gets under way later this month – it will come with a new approach.

For starters, it won’t be a come-and-go shelter. Instead, it’s intended to be a temporary residence where the homeless will be allowed to live while they work on their plans for getting back on their feet.

“The goal will be for them to be out in three months, but some, I suspect, may end up staying five, six or seven months,” Forney said.

The new center will include sleeping quarters for 39 men and 12 women, and four dormitories for families with children. It also will have a gymnasium, chapel, food bank area and office space for social service workers.

Zinn said the advisory board hoped to raise $3.5 million with an “aspirational goal of $4 million.”

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At the new facility, residents will have access to more services aimed at helping them land jobs and overcome barriers to their being eligible for subsidized housing.

Those who fail likely will return to homelessness.

Expected to open in 2007, the new facility will not offer ready access to showers, telephones and washers and dryers to those who don’t live there.

“It’s going to be a residential facility – so that would be like letting someone in to someone else’s house to let them wash their clothes,” Forney said. “That will not be the case.”

Other programs, he said, will need to care for the homeless not willing to enter the turnaround program.

Plans call for a few beds available for emergencies, but stays will be limited to five days, after which tenants will be expected to either leave or agree to a step-by-step plan for ending their homelessness.

Shift from downtown

Once the new facility opens, the Salvation Army plans to sell its shelter property downtown, using the proceeds to start an endowment.

Paul Coley has a doughnut and coffee before lunch is served at the Salvation Army, 946 N.H. The Salvation Army is looking at changing its approach to serving the homeless, becoming more of a temporary residence than a come-and-go shelter.

Whether the changes will lessen the homeless’ presence downtown remains to be seen.

“We wish them good fortune,” said Loring Henderson, director at the Lawrence Community Shelter, 214 W. 10th St., formerly the Community Drop-In Center and the Lawrence Open Shelter.

“I see us meshing with what they’ll be doing,” he said. “But I also think it’s going to put more pressure on LCS; we’re already pressed for space the way it is now. Rather than there being two emergency shelters, there will be one.”

Henderson said he expects the consequences to be addressed in the city’s Task Force on Homeless Services recommendations, which are due later this month.

Zinn said the Salvation Army would continue to provide meals for the homeless.

“It won’t be at the shelter, obviously,” he said. “We’ll still be involved.”

Currently, the Salvation Army serves a noon meal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen, 221 W. 10th St., feeds the poor on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

At the Salvation Army shelter Friday, several homeless men and women said they would welcome the new approach.

“I hope be off the streets by then,” Tobias Two Feathers said, “but it would make a lot more sense to do more for people who are already doing everything they can to get off the streets rather than those who’ve been out here 10 years. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re not going anywhere.”

Two Feathers, 28, said he’d been homeless for about a year.

“When you are homeless, the one thing you need more than anything is stability, a place where you can get yourself established,” said Hank, who declined to provide his last name.

“You don’t get that at a shelter,” he said. “It sounds to me like what they’re talking about would be a more stable setting. That’s what I need.”

Hank said he just recently arrived in Lawrence. He’s from Detroit.