October 2018 Newsletter

October 2018

REACH Happenings:

REACH Home 2018/19 will open on or near November 15. We are pleased to announce that we will once again be partnering with Dimitri House, Inc. to open winter temporary transitional housing for homeless men and women at 102 N. Union Street. In preparation we are reviewing how our guests enter the building and working on rehabbing the front porch. We anticipate that we will house about 24 people for the winter and, as in the past, we will work with our guests to assist them in finding permanent accommodation.

As in the past three years we will need volunteers from the community in the following areas:

Set up and preparation – there is a lot to be done to in the building. We need people who can paint, move furniture, clean, and do general handyperson work, please call John Curran at 271-1053(leave a message)
We also need people who can help with building rehabbing, plumbing, construction etc. Please call Deacon Dan at 233-1755.

Meals – we provide a cooked meal each evening and are looking for volunteers to meet this need. Volunteers are expected to provide a meal for about 30+ people. Please bring the food to the REACH Home before 5:30 p.m. each evening. Volunteers may enter the kitchen at the rear of the house. We hope that meal volunteers will stay and serve the meal and greet our guests. To sign up to serve a meal please click here to sign-up.

Drivers – we need people who are willing to drive our guests to their appointments, such as medical appointments or drug treatment appointments.

Shift Volunteer– to help us control our costs we welcome volunteers who would be willing to do a four-hour shift at the Home. We will provide appropriate training for this kind of volunteer work. Such volunteers will be an invaluable source of building relationships and a supporting community for our guests.

For each of these two volunteer opportunities, Drivers or Shift Volunteer, in a few days there will be a sign-up form on our web page, REACHAdvocacy.org . Go to the Volunteer Opportunities tab where our Webmaster will be posting the sign-up forms.

As usual we run this temporary transitional housing by the generosity of people in the Rochester area. Please consider donating to REACH by sending a check to REACH Advocacy, P.O. Box 10845, Rochester, NY 14610. All contributions are tax deductible.

Now begins the work of getting the building ready, identifying managers and staff, and securing funding for this winter’s home. Please keep us in your prayers and thoughts.

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Meet our Team Members REACH Advocacy succeeds because of the hard work of our team, in the next few months we will introduce you to members of our team. We begin with Andy Carey, Co-Chair of REACH Advocacy. Andy graduated with a BA from Earlhan College with a Peace & Global Studies Major in 1995. Then he graduated from the Greater Rochester Collaborative's (Nazareth & SUNY Brockport collaboration) Masters in Social Work Program in 2015.

After working for a larger organization in the community mental health field for a while, he made the decision to leave the larger organization and co-founded MC Collaborative with a partner who also worked for a larger organization. As he said, “Having our own organization gave us the flexibility to help with the founding and operations of the Library Resource Outreach Center (LROC) and REACH. Also, it allowed us to work closely with many other initiatives aimed at assisting people facing the symptoms of addiction, mental health, physical health, and poverty. All of the work is built on a foundation of treating people with dignity and respect.”

For the past three years Andy has been the team leader for our excellent social work team at REACH. His initiative in training staff and working one-on-one with guests has helped REACH to create a truly supportive and caring community where each person is treated with dignity and assisted in working on their personal goals.

Andy is married to Bridget who serves as our meal coordinator. They are the parents of Martin (14), Jane (12), and Tessa (8) all of whom have assisted in meals and Martin has assisted with moving furniture. We are blessed with this family.

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REACH Organizational Development

As mentioned in the last Newsletter, REACH has contracted with CauseWave to work on refining who we are and what we want to achieve. It should be noted that CauseWave has made a generous contribution to our contract with them. To learn more about CauseWave go to http://www.causewave.org .

Sixteen members of our Team met with two CauseWave facilitators for almost three hours to help answer who we are and what impact do we want to make? At the end of our work we agreed on the following collective impact statement:

REACH will establish a continuum of service that empowers adults without appropriate housing to become a community of care and move into permanent supportive housing by 2034.

Over the next few months a core team of about six or seven of us will help to construct how we will realize this impact statement. At the same time we will be revising our by-laws to ready them for submission to the State of New York so that REACH Advocacy can become incorporated as a non-profit organization.

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Our Tiny Home Village dream – Work has continued on a site on St. Paul St. to help clear and reclaim some vacant lots for a future village. This work has been led by our valiant Team member John Curran who has successfully recruited many volunteers. Here are some photos of the progress being made.

Before – students helping to clear the growth.

And here is what in looks like now- the second photo is of Jack, a neighbor, and John.

A Tiny Home Village is part of our long-range vision to help homeless men and women find safe and supportive housing. We hope by December to have an architectural conceptual image of this dream.

Food for thought:

Why do people become homeless?

In Rochester more than half of all tenants spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent, and usually this does not include utilities.

It takes just one catastrophe to lead to eviction. There are forty eviction hearings each day in the Rochester courts.

Recent gentrification of buildings have priced once affordable apartments out of the range of the very poor former occupants.