Show Notes
In this episode of the Dover Download podcast, Deputy City Manager Christopher Parker chats with Susan Ford of My Friend's Place, continuing the podcast's series on local nonprofits.
Ford explains the Washington Street shelter opened in 1989 and houses single men, women and families under one roof, serving about 200 people a year. She was once a client herself, staying five months with her two children more than 30 years ago. Homelessness, she says, is not the problem but a symptom — substance misuse, mental illness, cognitive or developmental challenges and early trauma that leave people without the skills to sustain housing.
The shelter has grown from 17 to 28 beds by bunking rooms, and a $300,000 city appropriation funded a needed kitchen expansion. A small staff — Ford, a case manager, a program assistant and five to seven resident managers — keeps 90% of the budget aimed at residents. Two duplexes offer transitional housing for families waiting out affordable-housing lists that can run two years.
Ford walks through intake, which starts with a waitlist that turns over Monday mornings, and outlines volunteer work: counting bingo tear tickets at the Lilac Club Casino in Rochester, digitizing 30 years of records, gardening and front-office shifts. On donations, she notes furniture must be sturdy enough to move and good enough to preserve residents' dignity, gift cards are especially useful, and a coordinated network shares surplus food among area shelters and pantries.
In This Week in Dover History, we look back at August 1925, when more than 20,000 people flooded downtown for a parade, carnival and banquet celebrating Dover's new electric street lighting system, switched on at 8 p.m. on Aug. 14. The $20,000 project came in $146 under budget. The story continues into 2017, when the City Council approved converting all 1,700 city streetlights to LED, saving roughly $140,000 a year in electricity and cutting the city's carbon footprint by 482 tons.
More from Dover Download
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