 Whenever there would be any really catastrophe that was in the movies or on the air, she would say, always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers. Welcome to Values. I'm Shaquille DeLal. I'm here today with Mark Cowell of the Our Center. We're interviewing helpers this week, people who are diving into their responsibilities to the community. Not shirking away in a time of crisis, but instead committing themselves to the community to help. Mark, thank you for being here. Thank you for the invitation. Can you tell me about the Our Center? Sure. We're a family resource center that serves individuals and families who live in the St. Varian Valley School District. And basically as a family resource center, we provide resource and referrals to families who've hit a bump in the road, who find themselves suddenly vulnerable to having to make difficult decisions between what bills to pay, what bills they can't pay, or have suddenly found themselves in crisis. For instance, maybe they have an eviction notice or a shutoff notice in hand and they're not sure where to go or where to turn to get through that crisis. How long have you been here? Since July 1st. Okay. And how long has the Our Center been serving the community? Since the mid-1980s. Well, welcome to Longmont. Thank you. This is a great time to have people like you here. Appreciate that. How many people does the Our Center serve on a typical day? We can have anywhere between 100 and 200 people come through our doors every day. What sorts of services do you normally provide? So we have a myriad of services, but our main ones, we have a food pantry called our Community Market, where individuals or families can come in on a weekly basis and shop on our shopping floor free of charge and get groceries for their family. The larger the family, the more food they'll be able to leave with. We also have a Hot Meals program where we typically provide breakfast Monday through Friday, 52 weeks out of the year, and a hot lunch, 356 days out of the year. We also have a Resource Specialist team, which is basically a case management and they work with individuals either on a short term or a longer term basis where we can provide financial assistance like rent assistance, utility assistance, medical assistance, and also get them connected with other resources out in the community. So if we don't provide the resource, my case managers are very capable and connected with the community and we can hand them off to the great partners that we have out there. So I'd like to talk about each of those programs in detail. Let's start with the food pantry. That's a really important service right now, especially with the amount of dislocation that people are feeling with the shutdown of small businesses and the uncertainty right now about people's jobs. How does the food pantry work? So I want to talk about a couple of the services that you mentioned and how they've changed for the coronavirus and the specific services that you're offering right now. So first let's talk about the food pantry. How does that system work? So we've moved everything remote or outside of our building. So we're not allowing any of the general public into our building just to keep the social isolation, to keep the numbers down, to do our part to flatten the curve, as they're saying nowadays. If someone is coming to access our market and get groceries, we have a staff member outside of the parking lot. When someone comes in, they will direct them in a line around our building. They need an appointment. They do not need an appointment. No. It's just first come, first serve. You jump in line when you're next, you're next. We'll have the individual or the car come up to an intake spot and we just ask really quickly, we want to be able to see an ID and a current letter, something with their current address. We just need them to show it through the window. They don't need to hand it to us. Again, we're trying to keep that social distancing appropriate. Once they've stopped there, we send them around to the back of the building where we have shoppers on our floor fixing, putting together boxes. We bring those boxes out. We'll drop it off at the end of the car. Allow them to load their car. We walk away when they're done loading. We come up, grab the cart, swipe it down, send it back in. They load up. We go to the next car and we just continue that process outside of our building. That seems like quite the operation. How long has it been operating in this way? Since Monday. That's a really fast response. How is your staff doing in this time? Obviously, all of that extra stuff is a lot of extra work for them. That's a great observation. The first two days, Monday and Tuesday, we're really running off adrenaline and people were bustin' tail and doing a lot of great work. By the end of Tuesday, you could see people were exhausted. They're starting to run out of energy. We don't have a lot of volunteers in our building. We're actually adjusting, starting on Monday again, and we're reducing our hours just to half days instead of full days. I need to give my team a chance to catch their breath due to some of their other work. They're hanging in there, but we're having to pare down just a little bit so they can take care of their own physical and mental health. If they can't do that, they're not going to be in any position to help the community. We've just talked about the pantry service that you're offering in the outdoor market. Mark, can you tell me a little bit about the hot meal service that the hour center offers? Just like our market, we've shifted all of our services to outdoors. It's a drive-up type scenario. We have a lot of individuals that walk up or bike up as well, but everything is outside. Individuals can't come in and die like they normally would. It's a grab-and-go scenario. We focused on lunches at this time and suspended our breakfast for a few reasons. One, more people access our lunches than they do the breakfasts. And two, we've had partner organizations such as Youth and Family Services for the City of Longmont. They're asking if we can provide lunches to the free and reduced families who will not be getting anything during spring break. And we've had a couple of our nonprofit partners saying they need to suspend services because of the COVID-19 virus and could their participants access lunch with us? So we said, yes, we're going to be open. We'll provide services and lunches for those families and individuals as well. And everything is done in our kitchen. We bring it out. Again, they just show us their meal card. If they don't have a meal card, that's okay. If they can just show us an ID that we know that we live in the St. Rain Valley School District, we will give them a lunch for everyone and their family. And then they get to drive off and they'll have a healthy, hot lunch. So this is truly a service that you're just offering to the community. You don't necessarily have to go through the coordinated entry system to access that. No, definitely not. We've loosened a lot of the requirements for all of our services because we don't want there to be barriers and we know this is a very difficult time for everyone. And you mentioned earlier that you have some resource specialists. What sorts of help can those resource specialists offer? So a resource specialist team can help families in a myriad of ways. We'll sit down with the family, assess what their needs are, what their strengths are. Do they have any assets or resources they didn't think of that they could tap into? Once we've had that conversation, we'll determine with that family or work with that family to determine what or where they need assistance. And if we have the ability to provide that assistance, we'll do so. So that could be financial assistance in the form of rent assistance, utility assistance. We have some flexible dollars that we can help in other ways as well. If we don't have the ability to help someone, we could send them to or help refer them to a community partner who does provide those services. So oftentimes a family will come into us and not know where to turn. And that's what my team does is if we don't provide the service, we know who does and we'll provide that warm handoff and get them sent off into the right direction so they can get the help that they really need. So your role as a helper is incredibly important to the community because of the incredible lengths that you and your staff are going through to continue to support the community in this time of crisis. One question I have for you is what role can the public have in helping you? Are there things you need from the public that we can offer? Without a doubt, one thing we could use as volunteers. A lot of our volunteer base is in that vulnerable category. They're older and they've chosen not to come in until this crisis passes and I completely understand that and I completely respect that. And that's also left us in a position where our team is just going full speed all day. Basically carrying the load not only of their usual work but the load of about 30 or 40 volunteers that are typically in the building helping things go smoothly. One of the things about the hour center that I think is really remarkable is truly the breadth and scope of services that you offer on a normal basis even in times when everything is okay. Can you tell me a little about who your services are for? Yes, definitely. Thank you for asking. Since I've been at the hour center one thing that I've learned is the community at large has a misperception of who we serve and how we serve people. A lot of individuals think that we serve the poor so the poor are the most vulnerable and we do. That's only about 25 percent of the total population that we serve. About 75 percent of everyone who comes into our building are working families. Families who may be having two jobs, three jobs just to get by living paycheck to paycheck and then when there's a bump in the road they haven't been able to build up that savings and then a car breaks down or we have a virus outbreak like this and they have to stay at home because childcare and schools have closed and they're not prepared and there was no way they could be prepared. We serve those families. I've run into several families that have described this exact scenario to me and I say well that's what the hour center's for and the response I get is well I don't want to take away from those who really need it and my response back is what you're telling me is you really need our services. We're here for everyone. We're not just working with the the homeless and the most vulnerable but those who are teetering because of a situation like this we're here to help you see through to the other side. We want to build that bridge so you don't lose your home that you don't find yourself in a terrible spot once everything opens back up and maybe you lost your job. We're there for everyone and we want to encourage anyone who needs help with anything to come to us and we're going to do our best to make sure we can help everyone. In an ideal scenario how many volunteers do you need? You know if we had 10 to 12 every day things would go at a nice pace where I think everyone would feel comfortable not rushed and not totally exhausted by the time that they were done so 10 to 12 would be great. Food of course we've seen that our donations have dried up. Normally every day we've got people ringing our back doorbell bringing us groceries that they've picked up at the store which is awesome. We're not seeing that anymore because people are keeping everything now and I get it. It's an anxious time and people don't know what to expect so our food donations have really dried up. We do a lot of grocery rescue. We're not getting anything from the grocery stores are very little at this time and again it's because they don't have anything to give us their shelves are empty. So we have a great partnership with community food chair and they're supplying us with as much as they can. We're procuring some stuff and purchasing some stuff but food is a huge need at this point. And then financial assistance you know to be able to offer more in the way of utility assistance or rent assistance to be able to cover the overtime that we don't have budgeted that we're going to start incurring because a lot of my staff are staying extra. A lot of my part-time staff agree to go to full time to help us through this crisis. So we're incurring a lot of expenses right now that we didn't have in the budget and as a non-profit we have a very razor thin margin to work with. So this is going to be interesting for us to manage this both financially and from a community service standpoint. If someone wants to offer help to you whether that's volunteering or a food donation or financial donation what's the best way to do that? I would have them call our main number and that's 303-772-5529. Okay Mark thank you very much for your time and your work and everything that you're doing for the community right now. Please stay healthy. Thank you. You as well.