At 5:30 p.m. Monday, the front windows of St. Peter’s Church were dark, the parking lot empty except for one car.
But near the back of the Concord church, a few lights showed through a pair of doors. Three people bustled there between boxes of donated pillows, sheets and toilet paper, arranging tables holding antibacterial soap, flashlights, and poker chips.
They all prepared for opening night at Concord’s cold-weather shelter.
Volunteers Jake King and Adam Macdonald cleared chairs and tables from a long room filled with 50 green American Red Cross-issued cots. Macdonald’s girlfriend, Friends Program emergency housing director Arolyn Chappell, wrote numbers on the poker chips.
Chappell said the chips would be used as check-in cards for people needing to store their items overnight. Green, city-labeled recycling bins sat nearby with corresponding numbers.
“That way, nobody’s stuff gets mixed up,” she said.
Stuff would begin filling those recycling bins at 7 p.m. The shelter opened a couple days earlier than expected, though not before December’s subzero temperature nights and various snowstorms.
“We definitely pulled it together as soon as we could because of those cold nights and nasty weather,” Chappell said. “There were so many aspects that go into making this happen.”
In all, it took about three weeks to go from no plans to an operational cold-weather shelter. Concord Mayor Jim Bouley announced in mid-December that the city found a temporary solution for the second year in a row after the First and South Congregational churches discontinued their overnight warming shelters in 2014.
This has been a problem for the city’s homeless residents who battle addiction, since they are often disqualified from using Concord’s existing shelters.
To fill that gap, St. Peter’s Church has offered its empty space for two years. (It has two potential buyers this year, but parish business manager Charlie Purr said the paperwork wouldn’t be done for six months, anyway).
Despite being plenty busy between its four initiatives, the Friends Program has volunteered to oversee shelter operations for those same two years.
Concord City Council appropriated $30,000 for the effort last year, and again this year, too.
For everything to fall into place for this winter, the final, rather significant piece was finding enough volunteers to fill the 900 shifts it takes to run an overnight, cold-weather shelter for three months.
That turned out to not be a problem. Volunteer coordinator Terry Blake said Monday that 90 percent of those volunteer slots have already been filled using an online sign-up system.
“People have been incredible,” she said. “As soon as they announced it, we started getting responses from people.”
About 200 individuals have signed up thus far. The shelter needs a dozen people per night: four to help with check-in between 7 and 8:30 p.m., four to be there overnight, two to help check-out at 7 a.m., one to pick up laundry once per week, and one trained, paid overnight manager.
The check-in and overnight volunteers slowly trickled in Monday night.
Peter Brankman, a longtime Concord resident now living in Andover, said he volunteered last year, too. When asked why he chose to do it, Brankman looked up from signing his volunteer release form and simply said, “Something has to be done.”
Eileen Keim, who lives right around the corner from the church, said she used to run the St. Peter’s Food Pantry.
In its new form as a temporary shelter, Keim said, “I’m so glad to see it used.”
Jim McCann, a retired member of the U.S. Coast Guard, said he somewhat randomly decided to volunteer in Concord even though he lives in Manchester.
“For some reason, I saw it on the internet,” he said. “It was like 15 minutes after I said to my wife, ‘No one should be out in the cold.’ ”
In Concord, for this year at least, no one has to be. With half an hour to go, Chappell of the Friends Program gathered her volunteers into a circle and explained what the rules were (no drugs or drug use inside), and how to check people in when the doors opened at 7 p.m.
Outside, a group was already gathering on the steps of the parish building. Standing with their belongings in a loose circle of their own, people waited for the moment when they could finally get out of the cold and go inside.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)