Taking the next step

After serving the Monroe and Sky Valley community for 12 years, Take the Next Step has the funds to hire on a full-time executive director.

The search is on.

TTNS founder Donna Olson said she is hoping to find someone that can take the work already being done to the next level.

“We want someone with experience to help grow our staff and board (of directors),” she said. “We would also like someone who can reach out to our neighbors and hear their stories and become an advocate for them; we spend quite a bit of time trying to advocate for the homeless right now.”

Olson started Take the Next Step in 2005. She was teaching GED classes in town at the time, and saw her students’ basic needs going unmet, unable to afford things like toiletries, while also looking for employment.

“That means people who are looking have a hard time because there are a lot of barriers,” she said. “I knew there would be people who would be happy to help.”

Olson is a long-time member of the Monroe Covenant Church. She asked for access to the former parsonage, which is now the Take the Next Step’s drop-in community resource center. It was cleaned out in 2004, and then painted and restocked with donated furniture, she said.

For a few years, the nonprofit’s clients were mostly Olson’s students. She remembers a single mother “with three teenage boys who didn’t have enough food to make it through the weekend,” and a student who “lived in a mobile home who had kids with pneumonia.” She would bring in clothes her own children had outgrown, so the students could swap.

By 2006 people experiencing homeless in the area had started to hear about Take the Next Step as a resource, Olson said. She said the executive director will need to be ready to work with that population.

“I want them to help people understand the amount that people make hasn’t increased at the same ratio as the cost of housing has increased, so we are going to have more and more homeless people,” she said.

Olson said anyone can accept the nonprofit’s services, from infants to seniors.

Take the Next Step offers community programs, including weekly dinners, a support group for teen mothers, an after-school club for kids, life skills classes and services at the drop-in center.

The nonprofit is sustained primarily by community donations and some grants, Olson said. Hopefully the new hire will have grant writing skills, because it is a process. Six part-time employees and 300 volunteers help run the place now, she said.

Last year those volunteers worked about 16,000 hours, and 1,000 were middle and high school students from the program’s Kidz Club, Olson said. 

Quinn Jay started out as a client, then became a volunteer at the drop-in center. She said she attends the community dinner every Tuesday. She started coming to the dinners as she was leaving a bad marriage. She didn’t have many friends, but “just felt an instant connection” with people at the event.

Her daughter, Cassy Hollan, usually joins Jay. Hollan said she lives in a home where there is “lots of yelling,” and the dinners are a good time to get out of the house and socialize, “otherwise I just stay in my room.” The mother and daughter agreed the weekly gathering is also a great place to get access to healthy food in a safe atmosphere.

The executive director position will be funded for four years with grant money from the M.J. Murdoch Charitable Trust, Olson said. They will gradually provide less and less over that time period. Eventually, Take the Next Step will have to pay for the position. She said to receive the startup money, staff had to prove self-sufficiency would be possible.

With projections based on income from the past 12 years, Olson said she believes that transition can be made. She said the new position will allow her to step down from a leadership role, which she is ready for. She has been the nonprofit’s board chair, and volunteered regularly over the years in each of Take the Next Step’s programs.

Olson said she is hopeful they can find the right person. She will stick around to help the new hire ease into their role, and remain a volunteer in many of the programs she cares about.

“I believe that some people win the birth lottery, and they grow up in a family that they have what they need and they find support, and there are a lot of our population around the world that doesn’t win the birth lottery, and they are lacking, they are neglected many times, they are abused,” Olson said. “I think that it is a beautiful thing when the people who have enough in excess can share with those who don’t, and Take the Next Step is a place where individual needs meet with generous people.”

Take the Next Step is accepting applications until the end of June.