32 CAPTURE. COSTTREE 2016 Q3 ISSUE
CT: What is the mission of St. John's?
SJ: Our mission is to support homeless mothers and help them regain control of their lives and learn how to take care of themselves, as well as their children, permanently. We started on the steps of a church about thirty-one years ago as an emergency shelter. We were open from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., and we gave them a roof over their heads and a meal. In 2007, a mother and her daughter came into the shelter as well as another mother and her two sons. I found out that these two mothers were sisters and that they had been at the shelter eighteen years ago with their own mother. I realized that you can't just give someone a roof and a meal and hope it will change the direction of their lives.
We wanted to help them exit the cycle of poverty and homelessness permanently, so we now have an eighteen-month program to help mothers regain control of their lives and become self-sustaining.
CT: What are St. John's current goals in the next 3 years?
SJ: One goal would be to better meet demands—we have a waitlist of 300 women and children. We are currently buying the building next door to increase our capacity for an additional ninety women and children.
Another goal would be to develop and diversify our funding sources. We have a five-million-dollar budget, and we don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket. There are a lot of strings attached to public dollars available for homelessness, so we are trying to develop new funding that will allow us to fulfill our mission without requiring us to compromise in areas that we believe would be detrimental to our clients.
Lastly, we want to continue trying to improve what we do. When we first changed from being a shelter to a program that changes lives, we didn't have a role model or program to look at for guidance. Our overall goal is to build this model, so, at some point soon, people could come and look at what we’re doing. We would then give them all the forms and plans, and they would be able to replicate it in their community.
CT: Are there any hurdles you foresee on the path to achieving those goals?
SJ: Currently, nonprofits receive a lot of criticism for marketing because of the simple thinking that every dollar given should go into direct service. But, the bottom line is that I can't serve the people well if I’m not driving customers into our business that can help give women the training they need to get work and to keep work. There is not a lot of progressive thinking in this area. There is naive thinking that started when they said no organization should have more than ten percent overhead. When you’re a 100-million-dollar organization that may make sense. But, if you’re a million-dollar organization, that means I can't hire staff and pay them a combined salary of more than $100,000. It is a way of thinking that needs to evolve because it’s suppressing the nonprofit community.
Peter Drucker wrote an article called, "The Age of Social Transformation," and what he is arguing is that the government can't take care of society in a very effective way, and there needs to be a third sector.
Michele Steeb David Chavev
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