When you're homeless, there aren't a lot of places to get a decent haircut. Shelters offer them now and then. The library does a couple of events a year.

"There's no place. You can go to the jail," joked Rand Satoskar, whose gray curls had recently started to flare out from beneath his faded baseball cap. He sleeps in a tent and occasionally drops into the Peace House community center in Ventura Village during the day.

On Wednesday, Satoskar was excited to get a proper summer shave. A dozen barbers from Shifty's Premium Cuts in Mounds View had created an ad hoc salon on the back patio of Peace House, offering professional grooming to anyone who wanted it. The demand was immediate, as Peace House's regular clientele of homeless and low-income people ordered the features they wanted right off the barbers themselves: clean neck tapers, defined beard lines.

Peace House volunteer Charlie Quimby, a self-taught barber, gives utilitarian haircuts there once a week. But he can only fit in about eight or 10 cuts at a time and can never keep up with the demand, executive director Marti Maltby said. Wednesday was Peace House's first time having professional stylists.

Shifty's founder, 25-year-old Nathaniel Sheferaw, died one year ago to the day in a car crash while visiting California. He'd had ambitions of opening a barber school, and expanding his shop to create more jobs, said his brother Germay Sheferaw,c who took over Shifty's to keep Nathaniel's legacy alive.

"It's been a long process grieving, and unfortunately because of having to take over the job and do this and that, you don't really get a chance to process it emotionally, personally," Sheferaw said. He believes his brother would have loved to see his barbers work with the people at Peace House.

Alex Kormann, Star Tribune
Gallery: Shifty's Premium Cuts barber shop honors one year anniversary of owner's death by donating 100 haircuts to the community

Kenzie Johnson of Recovery Corps, which does addiction treatment outreach with people experiencing homelessness, connected Shifty's with Peace House. She had been homeless herself in recent years, and had a feeling that Sheferaw's crew shared an understanding with the community center's mission of treating everyone with dignity regardless of their circumstances.

"When I was unhoused, I had substance use, I had a lot of mental health trauma going on," Johnson said. "At the end of the day, what I've learned so far on the other side of recovering is people just want to be treated like humans, and have human connections like this."