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UMF students’ successful grant writing supports homeless shelter

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Western Maine Homeless Outreach representatives formally accept a $5,000 grant award a community health class at the University of Maine at Farmington worked to secure to support the homeless shelter in Farmington. From left to right: students Melissa Sawyer Boulette, Ronie Morales and Rhiannan Jackson; Tricia Plourde, shelter manager; Ryan Goding, a shelter board member; Shelly Lowell and Kristin Campbell, both of Skowhegan Savings Bank; and Kelly Bentley, a community health professor at UMF.
From left to right: Tricia Plourde, the shelter’s manager; Ryan Goding a member of the shelter’s board of directors and Kelly Bentley, assistant professor of community health at UMF, who explains her students’ work towards securing a $5,000 grant for the shelter.

FARMINGTON – Guests staying at the homeless shelter will be able to stay through the day and take classes this winter, thanks to the efforts of a University of Maine at Farmington class that applied for and received grant funding from a local bank.

As part of their course work, students in Kelly Bentley’s resource management and grant writing class secured a $5,000 grant through the Showhegan Savings Bank charitable foundation to support the Western Maine Homeless Outreach shelter.

The funding will allow the 16-bed shelter, located in the lower level of the Living Waters Church on Wilton Road, to remain open through the day and provide an educational class program.

Without the grant, the homeless shelter, which provides temporary accommodations for all ages, would have had to close each day at 8 a.m. and reopen again at 4 p.m. beginning next month due to a shortage of funding. Having to close the shelter during the day requires all guests to find a warm place to stay through the day. In the past when the shelter’s funding came up short for a day program, guests, some of whom were mothers with very young children, would have to walk along busy Wilton Road to the stores or into town a few miles away and wait until the shelter reopened.

The grant funding the UMF students successfully applied for through the bank’s charitable foundation will allow guests to stay all day at the shelter through April, said shelter manager Tricia Plourde. It will also provide staffing for Rent Smart Program classes to be held during the day on subjects such as finance strategies, nutrition and thrifty recipe demonstrations, tenant-landlord relationship tips and more.

“We desperately needed to get the funding to be able to do the day program,” said Ryan Goding, who serves on the shelter’s board of directors.

Bentley, an assistant professor of community health at UMF, said her students were first assigned to research and identify what the needs of the local community are. Together the students assessed the various charitable agency needs and decided to focus on the homeless shelter.

Plourde said the UMF students began with the question,  “what are your needs?” Her response was that being able to keep the shelter open through each day this winter was her biggest concern as funding shortages approached.

Three UMF seniors of six students taking the class, Melissa Sawyer Boulette of Arrowsic, Ronie Morales of Long Island, N.Y., and Rhiannan Jackson of Saco, were impressed with the service the shelter provides.

“It’s an excellent program that provides temporary housing for up to three months and they help people find permanent housing,” Sawyer Boulette said. As part of their course work, the students toured the shelter and visited a few times, attended a board of directors meeting, and kept in constant contact with Plourde as part of their assessment.

Morales noted the importance of the Rent Smart Program which gives shelter guests the tools they need to be able to successfully stay in permanent housing.

Jackson added that a person who finds themselves homeless “can be stigmatized” and needs to know how to navigate toward finding housing and keeping it for the long term.

The students also researched available grant funding possibilities,  looking for donors who may be interested in supporting the needs of the shelter. The Rent Smart education piece of the students’ grant proposal that included “financial literacy meshed with our program,” said Shelly Lowell of Skowhegan Savings Bank, who serves as a branch manager in Farmington and Phillips.

The students say their work to help the shelter will continue. They want to find students and community members who may be interested in volunteering to staff the shelter.

 

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4 Comments

  1. Congratulations to both the students and the shelter for putting together a grant that will keep the shelter open during the day in winter time.

    Eileen Liddy
    Wilton

  2. good job, why don’tthey do some fund raising like the animal shelter to bring in some donations

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