 I'd like to welcome everyone who's going to take this tour here at Salvation Army in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. We are just having a grand opening of our $3.6 million project. I am standing in our new lobby, which is the midpoint between the renovation of our old building and the construction of our new building. If you come along with us on this tour, we're going to be taking the tour with some other people, citizens from Sheboygan, and you will see the various parts of our building, meaning our homeless shelter, our free clinic, our social service area, our food pantry, our administration, and also our chapel. I hope you enjoy the tour, and I hope you are impressed with what the community has put together and helped to support in the last five years. Good morning. I'm Char Knightsel-Gustry. I'm a social worker at the Salvation Army, and I'm the housing counselor. I'm glad you could join us this morning. We're currently in the James French Lobby. This is where anyone that is coming to the Salvation Army for services would begin their visits, whether it would be for lodging or for housing issues, for the medical clinic or the food pantry. We'll start our tour with the emergency lodge, then if you'd like to follow me over here in the emergency shelter. This is a floor where the residents would eat. We have kitchens in this area, and it is a community area for the lodge. We also teach classes in this area and do a number of other things. This is Jenny Miller, who is the director of the shelter. Hi. Welcome. Does anybody have any questions for me? Does anybody have any questions? I'm the manager of the shelter. Do you hear me? I'll try to talk loud and let me know. We have a 30-day policy here where you start with 30 days of staying in shelter, and then you can request an extension if you need to after that. We have capacity right now for 35 with the opportunity to go up to 45 if necessary. We did order some bunk beds already. We generally run a lot more males on the second floor is all males, third floor is women and children. Generally people have to do chores when they come in. They have to attend meetings. They have to meet with myself, I'm the case worker, all those different things because it's not a flap house, it's a place, it's actually a program where people need to follow through so that they can get out and be as stable as possible. There's rules and things that they also have to follow while they're here. Any questions? This is the dining room area, and over here is the kitchen when you come around the corner. All the residents eat their meals here in the dining room. We have some televisions, but there's no television until five o'clock at night until midnight, and then on weekends because during the day they're really supposed to be out doing the things that they're supposed to be doing as far as job searching, looking for apartments following through with referrals, resources, all those things. And then there's another smaller lounge over there. That's usually where we have a Bible study on Monday nights. Sometimes people with children might meet there. It's just a little more quieter space over there. So you can come on through and check out the kitchen. This kitchen here is about four times the size of the old kitchen where we used to be. You'll see that when you get up, Joan knows that. You'll see that when we get up to the old shelter, which is now the administrative office is upstairs. The shelter kitchen area was donated by Bruce and Carol Grover. Many of the meals in the shelter are provided and cooked by volunteers. So this facility, it's much more roomy than we used to have, and it lends itself well to those volunteers to do that for our residents. Across the hall you'll see the lounge that Jenny had referred to. It's a little bit of a quieter place sometimes used for Bible studies. There's a TB. Families can interact with their children here as well. We're going to head back then, the way we came. You'll notice on the left side of the hallway are washers and dryers, which are used by the residents. We have male and female floors. The floors are laid out the same way. And both floors have family suites. I'll show you one now. This would be for parents with their children. Married couples are allowed to stay together. They don't have to be separated between floors. Lay suites, a lot of people don't realize that homelessness affects children as well, but it obviously does. And it makes it a little bit nicer for those families who are in crisis anyway to be able to room together. One of the features of family suites are their private bathrooms. The bathrooms for family suites also have tubs to make it more convenient for the children. In the shelter, this is the smaller door room. This is the main restroom for this floor. In the previous shelter... Made by various organizations throughout the community. It helps the place to be a little bit more homey rather than institutional. Services area of the building. In this area, we have the director of social services. We have Jenny, the lodge manager, and myself, the housing counselor. The staff here have master's degrees in social work and in counseling. This is the area where we'll meet with clients, try to determine what their barriers are, what their different situations are, and try to find resources to help them become independent again. Last year through my offices, I served 1,290 different households. So it's a lot of people coming and going, a lot of people in need, a lot of people in crisis. Any questions? The new Red Shield Clinic, and it was donated in memory of Mary Lou French. Pam Sandy is with us, who is the director of medical services. And Pam will tell you a little bit about the clinic. Hi everybody, welcome to the medical clinic. I am Pam and I am in charge of the medical services here at the Salvation Army. And my main responsibility is to keep the free clinic running well. We hold seven clinics in the course of a month. We have clinic every Thursday evening, two Monday evenings, and then one Thursday morning. Audrey here actually is one of my volunteers on Thursday mornings. So it's nice to see you here, Audrey. The clients who come into our clinic services must be determined to be low income. We work with 185% of the poverty level, and they may not have any medical insurance. Those are our criteria. We have approximately 450 clients at any one time who come here and utilize our services. In each clinic session, we see approximately 15 people. So we saw well over 1,000 visits last year. The services that we provide are very similar to those that you would find in one of the walk-in clinics that we have here in Sheboygan. We do consider ourselves to be an acute episodic clinic. Clients can come up to 12 times per year, and each visit would be considered a standalone visit. Additional services to our clients are provided by Memorial Hospital and St. Nicholas Hospital. Memorial Hospital will provide laboratory services for us, and St. Nicholas provides x-ray services for us. Our clinic is run by volunteer medical caregivers. We have doctors, nurse practitioners, and PAs who come in, as well as nurses and support staff that do the eligibility component. All of our clients receive $350 for a calendar year, and those dollars are used for things like prescriptions, eyeglasses, and referral appointments. One of the things that we got with the remodel here was we got air conditioning. We have not had air conditioning in the past, and for the past 14 years we've been hot. So this will be a lovely addition here in the clinic. Also, one of the newer things is we now have two exam rooms for the clinic. So we can room a patient in one room, and then I have doctor with the other, and doctor is able to go back and forth now, just like a regular office would operate. Food pantry, which was donated by the Kohler Company Associates. This is very different for us. For the past 20 years, the food pantry was located in the basement. It made it very inconvenient when we received donations that would be brought in through the first floor, taken down to the basement, then taken back upstairs again. We now have the food pantry all on one floor, which makes it much more convenient. Through food pantry, we're utilizing a different system in the food pantry these days. Clients will come in, and they will be given the opportunity to shop for themselves. They're aware of what their family likes and dislikes. Previously, we had all prepackaged items, and if it was something the family didn't like, then it would basically go to waste. So now, based on family size, individuals are told they can have X amount of items from this area or that area. It makes it much more convenient for the clients and for the family, so they get the foods that they really do like. The food pantry is open Monday through Friday morning and afternoon, and we also do have available evening hours the first three Wednesdays of the month, which is very helpful for those families that work for a shift. We'll be going into the warehouse area now. We're 10,000 parcels of groceries were given out, so that means a lot of work goes on in this area. We utilize many, many volunteers as well in the food pantry. One of the nice things with the renovations is we now have a loading dock, so trucks can back right up and unload the products. The volunteers work very hard in here to separate those items and then stock them on the shelves. As clients shop in and the items need to be refilled, it's much more convenient than running back and forth up and down an elevator to restock those shelves. Any questions? Do some stores give if they have over a button on some stuff? Yes, we get a lot of donations through stores. Some might be donating their bread or their produce. There are an abundance of food drives either through schools or community service groups, churches, sometimes also do food drives. Do you get dentures from food stores, camps? Oh, yes, we do. Do people come through this area to or is this the stocking area that you bring up there? The client does not come into this area. This is utilized strictly by the volunteers to separate and stock the shelves and then the clients would pick from the area up in front. This was formerly the dining room for the old lodge. So if you can imagine from this wall over coming to feed 21 people at the same time in this small area, it became rather challenging. And this area was the kitchen for the lodge. Since the renovation, it's being used now for a great room and also volunteers use this area. So you might see a volunteer working up here or as I said, staff would come up here for their breaks. So we'll head into the old lodge. As I said, this used to be the old lodge and if you can imagine from here on over and back was the staff office for the lodge. So it's definitely come a long way with the addition. Down this hall had been the residence rooms for the lodge and those have now been converted to administrative offices. We have housed in this area the volunteer coordinator, the majors offices are down this hallway, the accountant, development director, and the case manager for the transitional living program. This is formerly the men's dorm for the emergency shelter. Since the renovations, it is now the Bemis boardroom. A number of different functions happen in this area. Board meetings, obviously, but also staff meetings and at times Salvation Army will host community meetings as well that can be held here. In the lower level of the new building, the original plans did not include a full basement. But because of the generosity of a few private donors, we were able to put in a full basement. This is our classroom. It's used for a number of different things. We have classes here, meetings here. It's used for youth programs and also for Bible studies. It's a very nice addition. We have mechanical rooms. We have the IT room. Behind you is the heating and cooling system, which is energy efficient and it was combined with the old building as well. And we have some storage areas. We have more storage, the elevator room, and we have a staff laundry here. This is where all the bedding from the shelter is taken care of. We also have storage for the shelter here. And we'll be heading back into the old part of the lower level. It is now used as a nursery during church services. This is the fellowship hall and it has been dedicated to the health strong so we'll be leaving the Salvation Army and Chevoigan later this month. This is the area that is used for the Emmaus meals, which are conducted every Saturday. Those are put on by different area churches and it's open to the public. So I want to come down and have a free meal. This room also has dividers so it can be partitioned off to use for smaller groups as well. Before the renovation, we did also have offices down in this here. In addition, a new degree is that pike, monkey, and worm down here. We just came up our how patients for the clinic used to utilize those services unless you were wheelchair bound and then could use an elevator. So those stairs made it difficult for many people. It's much nicer having it all on one floor now. One of the other features of the new building is a bathroom with a shower, which may not mean a lot to most of you. However, some individuals choose not to come into the shelter and something that we all take for granted a lot of times is being able to shower. So now we can't provide that service for our clients as well. We also have an additional office space here which can be used by volunteers or interns. We're going to head into the chapel, a renovated chapel. Some of the things that have happened in here, it has air conditioning now, which is wonderful. Also the pews were removed and the chairs were put in. This serves the building well because they can be configured in different arrangements and that way it also makes the room more multi-purpose. The church has services every Sunday morning along with Sunday school programs, funerals and weddings are also performed in the chapel. During the tax season, this area is also used by the volunteer income tax assistance program. So individuals can come in and have their taxes prepared for free and into this building. And it hasn't been accomplished without the whole community coming together and helping to make this possible. I thank you all for coming and your donations.