Share, Council for Homeless confront challenges in New Year

Share by the numbers

In 2013, Share of Vancouver:

o Sheltered 1,400 homeless people.

o Served nearly 90,000 hot meals.

o Helped an average of 100 households per month with housing subsidies, other support.

SOURCE: sharevancouver.org

With fewer people coming to the Clark County Public Service Center to get property deeds and other legal documents recorded, fewer fees are landing in the bank account of Share Vancouver.

Share, Clark County’s leading nonprofit agency serving the homeless and hungry, is expecting a reduction in county funding of at least $150,000 next year.

“There are a lot less deeds being recorded and the fund is smaller,” Share Executive Director Diane McWithey said.

A funding cut that size doesn’t sound like much, but McWithey said that Share’s 2015 budget is already set at $5.7 million, and that $2.5 million of that is “pass-through money.”

“It is rental subsidies and deposits, transportation funds — money that comes into Share but immediately turns around and goes out for a client,” McWithey said. Share’s “true operational budget is $3.2 million, and we run an extremely lean machine. There is not room to make cuts.”

McWithey said Share already cut most of its staff training budget, implemented a salary and hiring freeze, and is prepared to draw from its reserves if a new fundraising campaign is unsuccessful.

Downturn’s impact

It’s all because of a changing housing and refinance market, according to Andy Silver, the executive director of the Council for the Homeless. Silver said the refinance market “has dried up. Interest rates were low for a long time and lots of people were refinancing, which really drove that fund. Now, most people have already done it, and interest rates are starting to creep back up.”

Meanwhile, he said, the inventory of homes for sale remains small.

According to tallies on Clark County’s website, just under 102,000 documents were recorded in each of 2012 and 2013. As of the end of November, the tally so far was just under 79,000 — and there’s never been a month when document recordings came close to making up that difference. The average for the past four Decembers is just over 8,000 documents. So it looks likely that the final tally for 2014 may be something like 86,000 documents.

The document recording fee, instituted statewide by law in 2002, has funneled $42 million to homeless services overall and $3.2 million to homeless services in Clark County, according to a 2013 report from the state Department of Commerce. The per-document surcharge for housing and homeless services is $40, with a portion staying local and another portion going to the state for redistribution; a chunk is dedicated to the private rental market.

Share administers shelters, homeless-outreach teams, daily hot meal programs, transitional- and disabled-housing subsidies, special matched-savings accounts for the working poor, and case management and connections with other local services, from job training to domestic violence survivor counseling.

According to its website, in 2013, Share sheltered 1,400 homeless people including 275 children; served nearly 90,000 hot meals; helped an average of 100 households per month with housing subsidies and other support; regularly sent weekend food packs home with approximately 2,000 children at 90 local schools; provided 11,369 free meals for children during the summertime.

Major Gift Society

Early last year, McWithey said, Share started brainstorming a circle of reliable and deep-pocketed donors whose support would help the agency expand its programs. Now, Share is pursuing the plan and inviting those donors to step up — but just to retain the agency’s status quo, McWithey said, and cushion it from future market gyrations.

“It was going to be to grow the capacity of our programs,” McWithey said. “But now what we are trying to do is sustain our levels of service. Without this campaign, we are going to have a budget deficit for 2015.”

McWithey said she has no idea what might get cut if it comes to that. “We do so much emergency service. Do you cut shelters, do you cut meals, do you cut family support?” she said.

There’s no good answer. Instead, McWithey is hoping for a fast start to what Share is calling the We Share Major Gift Society. If you sign up and donate before Jan. 31, you’ll be a member of the We Share Founder’s Club.

There are eight levels of support, starting at $500 (the “Hopefulness” level) and reaching all the way up to $50,000 (“Sustainability”). Each gift is for the 2015 calendar year. Visit www.sharevancouver.org to learn more about levels and rewards, including tickets to Share events and special activities, or contact development director Kim Hash at devdir@sharevancouver.org or 360-952-8227.