Lazarus House, Inc.

The overall goal of Lazarus House is to help families and individuals living in poverty meet their basic survival needs, regain their dignity and increase their capacity for long-term stability. Lazarus’s House’s vision is to create a community in which the violence of poverty no longer exists. Lazarus House provides a full continuum of services that offer nourishment, stability, comfort, and dignity to our guests. All our programs and services align with this goal.

Food Programs Goals:
-Provide high-quality, nourishing, culturally appropriate meals and groceries to all who come to us in need, in a setting of dignity and respect.
-Connect guests to additional resources to improve their health and stability.

Housing and Shelter Goals:
Whether Guests stay in our shelter for several nights or live in our transitional residence for two years we strive to:
-Provide safe, dignified, appropriate shelter and housing to families.
-Help guests meet their basic material needs to facilitate saving
-Increase their capacity, through case management and life skills development, to lead healthy, stable and productive lives in their own housing.

Community Resource Goals:
-Provide low-barrier services, on a walk-in basis, to community members who need free basic goods, such as personal care items, or assistance managing a variety of life challenges.

Thrift Store Goals:
-Make available highly affordable and high-quality clothing, housewares, and furniture at our three thrift stores. When guests have been displaced by fire, natural disasters, or other crises, we provide vouchers for free clothing, 300 or more per year.

Over nearly 39 years of operation, we have maintained a fundamental commitment to the dignity of every guest we serve, every volunteer who helps us, and every benefactor and relationship that supports us. We live our mission “to restore dignity and self-respect to people who are poor and in dire need.” Our advocates work with and support guests as they move out of poverty. We also expect our guests to take responsibility for rebuilding their lives.

Food Programs
With 7 FT and 6 PT staff, we operate:
-A Soup Kitchen, serving breakfast and lunch daily, 250-300 meals per day.
-A Wednesday “guest choice” Food Pantry, which provides groceries to 1,000+ households per week and fills emergency orders.
A wide array of partnerships enable us to meet the high community need with 95-99% donated food.

Shelter and Housing
Lazarus House operates a 5-unit, recently renobated emergency shelter for families. Capernaum Place accommodates 18 families for up to two years and two single adults with disabilities on a permanent basis. All participants benefit from:
-Individual case management.
-Life skills workshops.
-Vocational guidance and access to educational resources.
-Housing search assistance and tenancy skills education.
-Financial literacy and financial asset building opportunities.
-Health screenings, connection to primary care, and behavioral health services.
-Recreational activities and outings, birthday and holiday celebrations, and other normative experiences.

Three expert case managers oversee our housing programs, assisted by support staff. The Shelter is staffed 24 hours a day.

Community Resources
Our Community Resource Specialist helps 2,800+ guests per year, on a drop-in basis, access a multitude of resources available at Lazarus House or through partnering providers.

Thrift Stores
Our attractive, culturally responsive thrift store offers highly affordable seasonal, high-quality gear. The store distributes free items when available, builds a sense of community, and serves as a conduit to other Lazarus House programs.

First, Lazarus House is anchored by solid community roots. We were founded by a small group of Lawrence residents, united by their faith and their resolve to address the great hardship they observed in their community. Thirty-seven years after we first opened our doors, we remain true to our grassroots origins, drawing on a broad base of individuals, businesses, civic groups, task forces, and faith communities who partner with us in our work.

Second, Lazarus House relied on community input to guide our programmatic growth. For example, we opened our Soup Kitchen when we learned of the paucity of daytime services for unemployed homeless adults. In the early 2000’s, we opened our transitional housing program in response to guests’ feedback about the difficulty of bridging shelter and permanent housing and to address the dire shortage of decent affordable housing in the community. Today, we continue to rely on guidance from participants and our community partners to identify and respond to service gaps. These collaborations ensure true wrap-around care while avoiding duplication of services.

Third, we recognized early on that coupling such basic services as food, shelter, and clothing with those that help to mitigate financial and social vulnerability is the most effective way to guide people out of poverty. Thus, our shelter and housing programs offer a rigorous menu of case management, practical skill-building, and opportunities to build residents’ financial capacity and wellbeing across multiple dimensions.

Finally Lazarus House’s knowledgeable and compassionate staff is our most valuable asset. Our 2011-2013 Capital Campaign enabled us to hire additional case management staff, notably a Director of Advocacy and a Community Resources Coordinator. We are well served by bilingual and bi-cultural staff throughout the organization, including all supervising case managers, who have masters’ degrees in the human services field. Fifty percent of Lazarus House employees come from the community we serve; some have also journeyed out of homelessness and understand first-hand the trauma of poverty.

Lazarus House opened its doors in March 1983 as a shelter with five beds and an all-volunteer staff. Over the years, we have added services to more comprehensively meet the needs of those in our community who experience poverty, hunger, and homelessness:

1984: We opened our first thrift store, to enable people to access clothes and household necessities at very affordable prices and to generate revenue for the organization.
1986: The Good Shepherd Soup Kitchen began serving meals.
1987: Our Food Pantry began operating in our shelter driveway.
2007: We opened Capernaum Place, a transitional residence for families.
2010: We relocated our Food Pantry to a permanent building and offered Guests the dignity of selecting food in a supermarket-style setting.
2011: Our first Culinary Program trainees graduated to gainful employment in the field.
2020: Lazarus House completely renovated the shelter building, turning the 8-bedroom, 41-bed facility into 5 self-contained suites for families.
2021: Lazarus House broke ground on a major renovation of our Soup Kitchen, allowing us to meet the great increase in demand for supplemental meals and walk-in service.

During nearly 39 years of operation, we have maintained a fundamental commitment to the dignity of every guest we serve, every volunteer who helps us, and every funder who supports our work and our community. Our advocates work with and support Guests as they move out of poverty. By providing support and resources, we help Guests take responsibility for rebuilding their lives.