Year End Appeal 2022
Dear Friends,
As most of you are aware, I’d rather clean the worst parts of the barn and deal with the most difficult of our kids than ask y’all for…A little bit more. I know that the vast majority of you give at the highest level you can and that no one likes feeling like their last gift wasn’t enough. But some people may have missed the last one or tossed it in the the round file without reading it or just don’t think we need another cottage or van or computer network.
As we close out 2022, we have the vast majority of our needs and a good chunks of our wants met thanks to y’all. But if a new cottage doesn’t float your boat and a new van doesn’t get you moving and computers are for nerds, we will always need good people to work with kids. Not everyone is cut out for our work and not everyone can absorb the parent and authority figure issues of kids for long. On top of those factors, we are facing never before seen attitudes about work and deserved salaries. While my frustrations about this often influences my vote, we still have a large number of kids to care for and every point of inflation feels a little bigger when your grocery bill is for so many.
I’m not complaining as we are fortunate to have employees that genuinely don’t care much about money and instead care that our work offers purpose and significance, but we do feel obliged to pay them a decent wage for what can be heartbreaking (but rarely backbreaking) work.
So, while some may scoff at a $21,500 starting salary, it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. When you start adding housing and food and medical insurance and all the taxes and other “add ons” each houseparent can cost us about $43,000 a year…and we hire couples..
If you’d like to help us to support some truly genuine and altruistic people as they set out to love other people’s kids without the expectation of the kids loving them back, please support a staff couple this coming year.
Sincerely,
Heath Kull – President
