Somerset Home for Temporarily Displaced Children
Jeffrey Fetzko, ACSW, LSW, CFRE
Vol. 7, No. 1, January 8, 2009
The Executive Director's News is published every two weeks, and is specifically written for the employees, board of trustees and friends of the Somerset Home.
This issue and past issues are available on our web site at http://www.somersethome.org/main/pages/employee_newsletter.htm.
Happy New Year!
Welcome back from the holiday break to everyone. We are all looking forward to a wonderful 2009. I wanted to share some of my thoughts on what we can expect in the new year.
First, you can't pick up a newspaper without reading an article about the economy. How does this effect us at Somerset Home? There is good news and bad news... The downward cycle of the market economy has negatively effected our pension investments. However, as long as you are not planning on retiring this year, we do expect the market to slowly recover over time and value restored to those pension accounts.
The good news is that our large government contracts which comprise more than 90 percent of our operating income is solid. We have some multi-year contracts and all of our annual contracts for 2009 have been successfully renegotiated and fully executed. We have a solid base of financing for 2009!
The news coming out of Trenton is scary. Just this week Governor Corzine announced almost $1 billion cuts to the current budget. However, I am very pleased that the entire Department of Children and Families (where our contracts are) was completely spared from cutbacks.
Another area of concern is individual contributions and foundation grants. Most, if not all of the foundations we work with allocate grants based on funds available from interest and dividends on large portfolios of investments. When those investments are down, fewer grants are made. This has effected us a bit but frankly not as much as I expected. For example, this week we received a $10,000 grant from the Tyler Foundation and $2,500 from the Post Foundation and several $1,000 individual contributions. I am very encouraged by the continuous support of our long time funders.
Foundation grants are important to us because they allow us to fund capital expansion projects. We have several capital projects planned for 2009 as follow:
The Passages heat/air conditioning and hot water heating replacement project is scheduled to begin within two weeks. By replacing the furnace and hot water heaters with 95% efficient units we are expecting to cut our energy expenses from $25,000 per year to less than $15,000. This represents a great savings, not just for this year but for years to come.
The planning for the My Place garage renovation is also progressing nicely. We have the final architectural plans and we are now discussing the plan with the township code enforcement and state licensing authorities. Once we have the scope of work fully conceptualized we will put the project out to bid. I am confident that we can complete this project by the end of the summer.
Also we have contracted for the roof replacement of Passages and Whitney House but the cold weather have pushed these projects back until March.
We continue to plan for a new transitional/permanent housing facility. However, because there are no new funds for operating grants from the state we will defer these projects until new funding is available.
Finally, as corporations, foundations and the state continue to suffer financially, all eyes are increasingly being turned to Washington, D.C. and the federal government. We will have an inauguration of a new President on January 20th and many new Members of Congress were sworn into office earlier this week. It is critical that we provide input to Washington, D.C. as new plans are being made for stimulus packages which include infrastructure development, housing and community development programs. We will do our best to ensure the needs of runaway, abused and homeless youth are addressed as these new economic recovery plans are being formulated.
There is much to do and I am very optimistic that there will be great opportunities in the coming year. My very best wishes to you all for a productive and exciting New Year!
As always, thank you all for your continued hard work on behalf of our youth.
