Sean C. Morgan
The Boys & Girls Clubs of the Greater Santiam are planning to reorganize and asking community members to donate regularly to help cover an apparent decade-long shortfall in funding for the Sweet Home Branch.
The club hosted a community town hall meeting on Thursday to explain the club’s current financial situation, which occurred following reports that the club’s Sweet Home branch is in jeopardy. Club officials warned last month that the branch would close within six weeks if the community did not make progress filling the funding gap quickly.
Since then, the club has raised commitments of some $9,000, said Ron Moore, a leader of an ad hoc committee dedicated to saving the Sweet Home branch and a former board president, who led the merger of the Sweet Home and Lebanon branches.
Going forward, loggers are donating 50 cents per truck load through through Cascade Timber Consulting, Moore said, and Fun Forest and the Rick Franklin Corporation are donating 50 cents per ton of crushed rock.
In 2004, the Sweet Home Boys & Girls Club was short by about $12,000, Moore said. Since then, it spent down its reserves with annual deficits.
“What happened in my opinion, Sweet Home always rallies around certain needs,” Moore said. “Over time, the knowledge of what goes on here kind of dwindled, and support dwindled. Nonprofits are gough, plain and simple. It’s tough to work for nonprofits. It’s tough to fund-raise for nonprofits.”
The gap from 2005 to 2007 was about $62,000, Moore said. With the recession in 2008, “that’s when things started hitting us.”
The club had a $90,000 loss that year, he said. “We knew we needed to do something different.”
Ultimately, discussion led to a merger with Lebanon, Moore said. The club operated as a single organization without financial differentiation between the two communities, and initially the new board was balanced with membership from both communities.
Moore, who was president of the Sweet Home board when the 2008 merger occurred, stressed that he trusted the Lebanon board members, who now hold all but one seat. They were there for the merger. He knows many of them personally, and they have Sweet Home’s interests in mind as well as Lebanon’s, he said.
Two annual auctions were tough on the pocketbooks of regular large donors, Moore said, so the club combined the auctions into an event that alternated locations.
“Sweet Home has had a hard time generating enough income to keep the doors open,” Moore said.
This year, the club calculated the revenues and expenses of each club, and Sweet Home is about $104,000 short.
The club increased the membership price to $30 per year from $20 last year, the first increase in many years; and the club began charging a fee of $5 per month for after-school programs.
Moore said the athletics budget is $82,000, and the core programs cost $381,000. Salaries run about $42,000 in athletics and $188,000 in the core programs. Athletics are short about $23,000, and the core programs are short about $81,000.
The Sweet Home Branch has 16 employees, two of them full time, said Branch Manager Dave Bauer. The club’s big expense is people.
Bauer outlined the highly structured club programs at the meeting.
The club has a membership of 852, with an average of 155 attending the after-school program daily. It also has 577 athletic participants.
The club provides “fun with a purpose,” he said. Buses arrive from schools between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. The children then attend an assembly.
Staff provide a lesson or maybe a skit, and then the children split up into the different rooms, including the games room with organized games, the computer lab, the art room, the library and the gym with activities organized by staff. Every 30 minutes, the club calls a switch, and the children move to different rooms.
Shared costs were allocated at about 70 percent toward Lebanon and 30 percent toward Sweet Home.
Moore said that expenses have increased, and revenues have decreased.
Details about the breakdown, which ZIP codes donate how much, might be disputable, but “I’ll say it again,” Moore said. “I know for a fact that Sweet Home has had a hard time raising money. Twenty thousand dollars or $60,000, it doesn’t matter; we’re still short.”
Moore is optimistic that Sweet Home can cover those costs: “There’s no doubt in my mind we can do that on an annual basis.”
Ryan Daniels said he couldn’t run his business for 10 years with those kinds of losses, and he was surprised that the community is only hearing about it now.
“We tried to keep it quiet,” Moore said. “It’s our fault.”
Now, club supporters are taking responsibility with this meeting and trying to show what’s going on, he said. It is unfortunate that the club has gone this far down the financial hole to get the problem in front of the community.
“You need to get people’s trust back,” said Wendi Melcher.
“That’s right,” Moore agreed.
Going forward, the club is looking for Moore and three or four others to step up and serve as a local board, governed by the Greater Santiam board. Lebanon Branch will do likewise. Those two committees will track revenues and expenses and make decisions locally. They will run the auctions and fund-raising events locally. A member of each will serve on the main board.
One member of the audience said that some people may have believed that they helped when they made purchases at the auction and gave a couple of scholarships, but they didn’t realize they could pledge $5 or $10 a month to continue helping.
That is what the club is asking members of the community to do – to commit to paying a regular amount to the club each month, Moore said. Forms are available at the club, 880 18th Ave., and direct withdrawal is available.
If 1,000 people gave $10 per month, the club would meet its goal, Moore said. “Not everybody’s here, but there’s enough people that can spread the word.”