Fall 2021 Newsletter
Greetings from Homes for Youth. We hope you had a thankful Thanksgiving and looking forward to a joyful Christmas and New Year. We are grateful for your continued support.
The Bearfootin’ Bear Auction for Downtown Hendersonville was a great success and especially for Homes for Youth. We garnered a contribution of $3,200 after the donation of the bear by our board member John Rapp! The generous buyers wish to remain anonymous, but they did send a picture (above) of Buttercup Kisses in her new home. We will have a bear in next year’s Bearfootin’ Bear Auction as well.
We are pleased that we have a new foster parent couple at our house in residence. Joshua and Christoph will be taking in children in December. Although they are new to foster parenting, they have a heart for it and the maturity to do well. We and Crossnore will be surrounding them with love and support. Since they came to us through Crossnore, we will be working together under a memorandum of understanding. This will be somewhat different than dealing directly with DSS but we have the same goals of fostering teen girls who have lost their homes.
We have new officers on January 1! Dave Bass is retiring as president as is Kelly Hart as secretary and Jim Nelson as vice president. Jim and Kelly and Olivia Urschalitz are leaving the board as well. They have served us well and we thank them heartily. Angel Chandler is our new president, with Dave Bass as vice president, Dave Lambert as secretary and Dick Kauffold remaining as treasurer. We will be adding three board members in January; James Stoltenberg, a retired pastor from Grace Lutheran; Lisa Fort, Certified Fund Raising Executive at Crossnore and Joreeca Dinnall who is a School Resource Officer for the Hendersonville Police Department. We are excited about the new backgrounds and experiences they will bring to our board.
At our board meeting in November, we adopted a diversity, inclusion, and equity statement. We have always acted in a nondiscriminatory way concerning the girls in our house but we felt it important to state this explicitly. Our board will also be more inclusive after January 1.
We had several maintenance issues addressed since our last newsletter. Some original bathroom fixtures in the children's wing were repaired or replaced. The drainage was improved in the front of the house to divert rainwater away from the foundation. The basement area was again cleaned of mold by Warren Restoration. This was fairly minor work compared to what was done several years ago. We removed some old furniture and junk from the garage. We also made arrangements for regular yard maintenance.
We have had several discussions about a partnership or working arrangement with H3 Collective, based in Buncombe County which has a similar mission to ours. They have a grant which could benefit us as well. After we introduced ourselves to Dogwood Health Trust and received encouragement concerning our own grant request, we have ceased those discussions. Dogwood Health Trust was formed after the sale of Mission Health to HCA and one of their missions is to support housing and foster children in Western North Carolina. We expect that we will submit a grant request next year to Dogwood to purchase another home to house teen boys.