from SRQ Magazine | October 2024: In Conversation with Innovators in Philanthropy

INNOVATION IN PHILANTHROPY

A SRQ Magazine Branded Content Program, October 2024

A CONVERSATION WITH:

NELLE MILLER OF ALL FAITHS FOOD BANK

BILL SADLO OF BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF SARASOTA AND DESOTO COUNTIES

COLLEEN THAYER OF NAMI SARASOTA AND MANATEE COUNTIES

BRENA SLATER OF SAFE CHILDREN COALITION

Interviewed and Compiled by Barbie Heit

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:

Nelle Miller is a longtime community leader with more than 16 years of nonprofit management experience in Sarasota County. Nelle was named president and CEO of All Faiths Food Bank in January a er previously serving as a board member and board chair. During that time, she helped lead the food bank response through Hurricane Irma and COVID. Prior to being appointed president and CEO, Nelle served on the boards – and o en as board chair – of several Sarasota nonprofits. In 2022, she was recruited to provide interim leadership to Jewish Family & Children’s Service of the Suncoast, and later, UnidosNow. Nelle was a founding partner of BizTank in Sarasota and PlanetResume and So ware House, both in Boston. She holds a BA from Brandeis University and a Harvard University Executive Program certificate in Governing for Excellence. She is an avid runner and volunteer, and committed to creating cultures that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion.

Bill Sadlo’s journey with Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota and DeSoto Counties began at the age of eight when he became a proud member of the Fruitville Boys Club (now the Lee Wetherington Boys & Girls Club). Bill later graduated from Sarasota High School and acquired his Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education from the University of South Florida in 1992. Since then, Bill has moved up the ranks in roles that have taken him all over the nonprofit, from an assistant program director to being named President/CEO in 2011; devoting his entire 35-year career to the organization that empowered him to succeed. In 2017, Boys & Girls Clubs of America presented Bill with the National Professional Service Award to honor his 30 years of dedication. Since then, he has been recognized with several other awards including; the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance Bull by the Horns Award for efforts in navigating and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the inaugural Boys & Girls Clubs of America Youth Megaphone Award (2022) for efforts to amplify youth voices, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America Robert M. Sykes Award for Professional Excellence (2023), the Sarasota Magazine Unity Award (2023), the SRQ Media Good Hero Award (2023) and CEO of the Year by the Florida Area Council of Boys & Girls Clubs of America (2023).

Brena Slater, SCC President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology Counseling and more than 30 years of hands-on experience in Child Welfare including relationship building, community development, leadership in case management, diversion, and strategic initiatives. Before transitioning to the CEO in October 2019, Ms. Slater worked with the Safe Children Coalition (SCC) for six years as the Vice President (VP) of Community Based Care, which proved her ability to successfully bring a community together to meet and exceed outcomes that beneﬁt children and families.

Colleen Thayer serves as the Executive Director of NAMI Sarasota and Manatee Counties (NAMI), an organization whose mission is to provide mental health support and education to individuals and families throughout our community. She is fortunate to be able to lead a team of peers who work daily to help others experiencing mental health challenges find the resources needed to achieve wellness. Colleen holds a master’s degree in Management and Leadership, is Accredited in Public Relations, and a Certified Public Relations Counselor. She is active with several local organizations and is the immediate past chair of the board of Centerstone Florida. Colleen and her husband Chad live in Sarasota County, and are proud parents of two sons and daughter, along with three fabulous black labs.

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LET’S START BY SHARING A BIT OF INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ORGANIZATION.

BRENA SLATER, CEO, SAFE CHILDREN COALITION

Safe Children Coalition is a large, $55 million a year nonprofit organization. Internally, we have about 300 staff members and we contract out for many more staff with case management. Our organization manages the foster care, adoptions and protective supervision for all of the children that are in Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. We also have a shelter that serves Sarasota and DeSoto children that we are contracted with and it’s a short-term shelter for families, whether children are runaways, truant or if parents just need a respite.

COLLEEN THAYER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NAMI

NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness and we are the Sarasota and Manatee County affiliates. We are one of more than 600 across the country, and there are 24 Florida affiliates. Affiliates run with anything from a handful of volunteers like ours started with, to NAMI organizations in say New York City, which is just huge. What we’re aiming to do is offer that level and amount of programming. We’re a mid-size organization in this market but we’re tiny compared to Safe Children Coalition. Our budget is about one and a half million now. When I started, I was the first employee they ever had and I was part time. That was about six and a half years ago. We’ve got 25 now, so we’ve grown a lot over the last six years. NAMI offers support and education as our core function. We are not clinical or treatment providers at all. We offer individuals living with any kind of mental health condition support programs and we do the same thing for families and caregivers. We’ve expanded into recognizing that there are a whole bunch of youth and young adults in this community that are having mental health challenges and that’s been exacerbated over the last couple of years. We have a family peer support program which is where we literally hold someone’s hands as they wade through the process and the services.

NELLE MILLER, PRESIDENT AND CEO, ALL FAITHS FOOD BANK

All Faiths Food Bank is the only food bank in Sarasota and DeSoto Counties and the largest distributor of food in the two areas. We distribute roughly 22 million pounds of food a year right now to over 70,000 of our neighbors. We have 700 distributions a month, and we have all kinds of partners in the community, including the Boys & Girls Club, especially over the summer, who we work with to get the food out to our neighbors. People sometimes have the misnomer that we’re a food pantry, but when you come to our facility out here on Blaikie Court, which is where we have our warehouse and offices, we have over 50,000 square feet of racks with food and freezers and refrigerators. So it’s like a small Costco.

BILL SADLO, PRESIDENT AND CEO, BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF SARASOTA AND DESOTO COUNTIES

We serve children 6 through 18 years of age in both after-school and summer programming. Last year we served 3,348 young people and are trending to do the same this year or more. We have 11 sites throughout Sarasota and DeSoto Counties. And of those 11 sites, six are full service Boys & Girls Clubs. Five of them are school sites where the children stay after school and we provide programs there. Lastly, I’d say we focus on three major areas–academic success, good character and citizenship, and healthy lifestyles.

WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT YOUR ORGANIZATION?

SLATER We have a HIPPY program, which is a home instruction for parents of preschool youngsters, and that’s where family advocates go in and prepare children to get ready for kindergarten. They work with our three, four and five year olds from low-income homes. The neat thing about that program is all of our advocates are or were HIPPY parents. We even have a mother-daughter team that works for us where the daughter was a HIPPY child and the mom was a HIPPY parent. We have a program through Sarasota County for school children that are homeless so that we make sure they can get to their home schools, help them with housing if they need it, school bus transportation, school uniforms and whatever kind of services they need. Something that is also different about us is that we serve thousands more children in diversion than we do in our system. People know us for having all the foster care adoption children, but we really work on diverting thousands of children outside of our system.

THAYER What sets us apart is that we are the only all peer-led organization around. NAMI is completely peer run, meaning everybody, all of our staff volunteers either have their own experience as somebody who lives with a mental health condition and/or is a family member. So for me, I’m a family member. Like Brena mentioned about the HIPPY program, the lived experience that you get from working with somebody who has been through a similar experience to you is it’s just part of that whole continuum of care that we think is part of recovery, and you can’t get through the normal treatment process, so it’s part of that process from a large service perspective. We’ve got young adult stuff too and we try to do a lot of outreach on suicide prevention and mental health support. We do that in and out of the schools as well. In addition to the family peer support, which expanded the last couple of years, we’re in year two with Safe Children Coalition to try to work specifically with fathers. We have a program called Parents for Parents that works with families in the child welfare system. We’re on the side of support and trying to get them through that very challenging time ultimately with a goal of reunification. Our parents that work in that program have been through that experience, and that gives families more hope. Also, we took over a program in 2021 that is a mental health drop-in center. We’ve got a site in Sarasota and one in Venice, and it is a program that literally provides day drop-in services for adults that live with mental health conditions. It doesn’t matter what the diagnosis is. These sites offer support groups, classes and wellness activities. We’ve got somebody who helps in the kitchen every day because they love to cook. We’ve got somebody who leads yoga, different kinds of things like that.

SADLO The community is starting to realize some of the high-level programming that we’re doing, especially with our teens serving as full voting members on boards of directors through our Star Leadership Program or starting their own businesses through our Perlman Price Young Entrepreneurs program. But other things people may not know about us, and this is very apropos for our partnership with Nelle, is that we served 97,000 meals and snacks last year. Couldn’t do that without partnerships like All Faiths Food Bank. We are also a true partner in education. For the last four summers, 100% of our youth have either maintained or improved their math and reading during the summer programs.

MILLER All Faiths over the last few years has really developed into an organization that provides wraparound services. We recognize that there are people who are coming to share food with us and that there are potentially other services that we can provide for them, especially out in DeSoto County. We provide help with the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) application, we provide help with tax returns and we also do a lot of navigating through the Uniteus platform to send neighbors to other organizations that provide services that they need. There’s a big movement in this country for food as medicine, or food is medicine (there’s an argument whether it’s ‘is’ or ‘as’). So we’re working with a lot of the medical practices, like Sarasota Memorial Hospital, to do hunger screenings. And then when someone’s determined to have some food insecurity needs, they are referred to us and we provide them with links to other organizations and services that they may need, as well as a permanent food distribution that they can go to. So we’re working to disrupt medical issues with nutritious food.

WHAT ARE SOME CHALLENGES YOU’VE BEEN FACING LATELY?

SLATER Our more recent challenges would be our high needs youth, children that are experiencing something significant, whether it’s mental health, substance abuse or just trauma throughout their life, and now all of a sudden they’re a teenager. COVID probably exasperated a lot of the feelings of children and some of the isolation. We are getting in earlier before their parents hit this crisis situation to where they can no longer handle their children. We want to make sure that this isn’t just our issue, but that it’s the community’s issue. These kids are our community kids. We’re not going to make them better in our foster care system of care because there are so many kids across the state and actually across the country that are having such significant needs that there are not appropriate places for them. I also want to say something about the partnership that we’ve had with Parents for Parents and Fatherhoods. It’s so important for people to understand that it doesn’t matter whether you have the best case manager in the world–having a peer that has gone through the system, letting a parent know they can get better, that they’re going to get better, it’s just been amazing to see some of the parents and especially some of our dads who are working on fatherhood initiatives. People tend to think it’s all about the moms but there are a lot of dads out there that are really good dads, they just haven’t been given the chance to try. I want to give a plug for working together with NAMI for that and really making sure that there are peers available for our parents. We have a community shelter that’s through a different funding source than the Department of Children and Families, which is our largest revenue. And we’re in the middle of a capital campaign to build a new one. Our current shelter only holds 12 youth, but our new shelter will hold 24 youth. Currently, there’s just not enough beds to take care of the high needs youth. A lot of them now are from Baker Act facilities where their parents are refusing to come pick them up or from the Department of Juvenile Justice. We’re getting these kids before they come into the foster care system, so we will take them into our shelter and try to work with the parents on getting the child back home as opposed to foster care because again, there’s no placements available in foster care either. We’re working on building a larger community shelter and hoping to break ground in the next several months.

THAYER The navigation/family parent support program that we have—we started that under a grant in 2020, the idea being that we could take a handful of families and our family peers would work with them and help them navigate that system of care and get them into services and advocate for them. We quickly figured out that we needed young adults also. So we’ve got several young adult peers on staff because they can connect with the kids. It is just very interesting to see how the parent peer can work with the family system, and the young adult peers are connecting with the youth and young adults. That program just has exploded, I think in part because it’s very hard to access services. We get a ton of referrals, and now we’re going into Cornell at Sarasota Memorial, which is their Baker Act facility for youth in Sarasota. Our peers are going in there to try to get a warm handoff on discharge, which is catching people earlier. You may come out of a crisis unit and you may need treatment, intensive outpatient or partial hospital, and SMH offers that, but there’s more need than they have space. So you might have to wait, and then we can help work in that interim with the family.

MILLER The challenge that we’re facing is if you look at the economy in this area in Sarasota County and DeSoto Counties, the misnomer is that people who are in a situation of poverty are the ones who we need to provide services and food for. But the reality is that there’s the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) level of citizen here, and we now know a family of four needs to be earning $94,000 a year to make ends meet in Sarasota County. The number’s lower in DeSoto, but it’s as difficult to attain there. So we have a whole group of people who aren’t considered within the group who would be considered at poverty level or below, who really require help. When we do math, there are probably 200,000 people-plus in the two counties that could be considered food insecure and we’re currently reaching 70,000 of them. Little by little, we’re starting to open up new partnerships and getting into parts of the community that we haven’t been able to collaborate with before. Also, when there is a storm, we’re part of the emergency response group within the county as well as within the state. With the last storm, we were able to maintain our normal deliveries once we started but we were also just taking food and water out on trucks and delivering it to parts of the area who were affected by the floods who don’t typically receive food from us. So we were just showing up at the door with pallets of water and food. We’re a big part of that emergency response, and I think that we’re probably going to hit the peak of that in a few weeks when people start getting back into their homes and they’ve lost all their food and have to start again.

SADLO Our families are the ones most affected by community disruptions like the pandemic and hurricanes. A nationwide study said 42% of high school students feel helpless. So we feel like the youth we’re serving, especially in our community where we’ve had so many disruptive issues, is that it may be a little higher for our teen. The mental health crisis is out there, it’s real, and we took some opioid prevention dollars that we got from the state last year in our lobbying efforts and we started a behavioral health program with an embedded full-time behavioral health specialist on our team. We also hire school social workers at each of our club sites.

CAN YOU SPEAK TO FUNDRAISING EFFORTS OUTSIDE OF GRANTS THAT OUR READERS MAY BE ABLE TO HELP WITH?

THAYER Ours would be our NAMI Walks. We do one fundraiser a year that is fundraising, but also huge awareness. NAMI Walks is a national program, so there are NAMI Walks all over the country. We were approved to start it here actually during COVID. The first one was a hybrid thing, and it’s been growing ever since. This will technically be our fourth. It’s October 5th, and that’s our main and only external fundraiser and awareness event we do. It’s a fun walk, so it’s not a 5K, 10K. It’s really just come out, have a good time, and then people can create teams and have folks join their teams and raise money that way.

SLATER Most of our funding is government funding. So one of the parts about government funding is that while they fund us for operational things, they don’t provide funding for capital. We are in the middle of a capital campaign right now, so we are definitely raising money for that to be able to build a new youth shelter. And that will be where we will be able to house up to 24 youth ages 10 to 17. Our current shelter and even our previous shelter had dorm style rooms or rooms where you had to have two or three children in them. Our new shelter will have the availability to have children with single rooms. There are pretty strict regulations when you have children in the same room. You can’t have children more than two years apart.

MILLER We run different campaigns throughout the year based upon what the current needs are. For example, we have a campaign against summer hunger that we run late winter, early spring where we provide kids with some subsidies to the food that they may not be getting because they’re not in school. In the fall, we run a campaign to raise funds so that we can purchase extra perishables. Produce is really important to us. We’re gravitating toward the healthiest food we can possibly source. So while we get a lot of the food that we distribute through donations from large distributors, we also purchase a great deal of our fruits and vegetables, proteins, milk, eggs and all of that. We also have a big campaign for purchasing turkeys. Last year we distributed almost 14,000 turkeys.

SADLO There are two major ones–I just mentioned the behavioral health program, and that came from opioid prevention dollars from the state through the Department of Children and Families. Unfortunately, going into this budget year, that was vetoed by the governors so we will be getting $213,000 less this year and we have to figure out how to privately fund that program. It’s too important not to keep and sustain. The second one is our Everyday Club Kids. It costs us $2,500 a year to serve a child. Many youth come for free and many are on scholarships to reduce rates. We charge nowhere near that. No child pays that much. Every youth is on scholarship at the Boys & Girls Club. So we have a matching program to match every gift, $2,500 per child, and they’ll be matched one for one by an anonymous donor.

EVERYONE LOVES A HAPPY ENDING. CAN YOU SHARE A SUCCESS STORY?

SLATER Everyone talks about adoption, but I love seeing the reunification stories. We recently had one of our case managers who saw one of our children who was a chronic runaway and difficult to deal with when he was a teenager, and he was on the run a lot, but we ended up finding him an adoptive home when I think he was close to 17, he ended up graduating high school, getting some advanced education. He’s now getting ready to go off to the Air Force. I love seeing kids that go on, even though they have struggled in foster care, and they struggled throughout their lives, but seeing them continue with their education and having them come back and work for our system is wonderful. Colleen gets to see it all the time, but we don’t get to see a lot of that. So whenever we do see it or they come back to be employed by us, I love it.

THAYER In our drop-in program, we have a gentleman who had issues with substance use, had issues with his mental health, and lots of ongoing challenges. He started coming to the drop-in and over time, he’s become very comfortable and interacts with everybody here so well, and he’s taken on leadership roles and is helping with other groups and new people coming in. I always find that really amazing to see when it comes full circle.

MILLER We just recently opened a new partnership in the Newtown area with a group and in a neighborhood that had never really responded to our offers of help in the past. I started going into Newtown and literally hung out in a park with some of the community influencers who have now established a partnership with All Faiths Food Bank and have a partnership at one of the daycare centers in the community. And as a result of that, other neighbors in the community there have approached us and have been willing to talk to us about how we can help them. It’s resulted in the design of a lot of new programs and a lot of piloting. I am so excited because we know that there are hundreds of people there who could beneﬁt with our help and our sharing.

SADLO Our teams recently went to the National Keystone Conference in Atlanta. Our club from Newtown, the Roy McBean Club, won the national award for Best Keystone Club. They won for the best project and they won for best Keystone advisor and they pretty much swept all the national awards.

WHAT ARE SOME LONG-TERM GOALS, LET’S SAY, OVER THE NEXT THREE TO FIVE YEARS?

SLATER Over the next three to five years, we want to continue our diversion and prevention efforts and doing outreach and making the community aware that it’s not just us, it’s the school systems, it’s the Department of Juvenile Justice, it’s programs like NAMI has. We want children being helped before they reach our system because once they reach our system, then there’s an abuse call that’s been made, so a child’s been abused, neglected, or abandoned once it reaches our system. Our goal is to make sure the community comes together and is educated to take care of all the children before they hit our system of care.

THAYER There’s a group of us really advocating for a first episode psychosis program here, which really would take kids that are experiencing a first episode, which typically happens between that mid-teen, upper teen and 30 at the outset, so those college age years in particular. If you intervene really early with this kind of team approach, and there are a couple best practice models that are out there, you have better outcomes. But it takes a village. It takes a very intensive team that works with these kids and their families for a long period of time. The closest one here is in Tampa. We took over Manatee County NAMI in 2020. It was in the middle of the pandemic, so everything went online. We couldn’t really do in-person services there for a long time. Really entrenching in Manatee is important to us for all of the programs in particular.

MILLER We need more space because we’re only limited by the amount of capacity we have here logistically. So a big goal is to probably double the size of our warehouse, which we’re currently in the beginning stages of working on. But that leads to us being able to serve a greater part of the population who could use our services. Right now, we can handle about 6 to 7% growth in our distribution a year. We know that we want to incrementally have reach. It beneﬁts us in so many ways if there’s an economic impact to the community when people are lifted up because they’re not worried about what they can’t afford to pay for. So it’s all about expansion and reaching people so that we can help them get to the next stage of their lives and make sure that they’re healthy.

SADLO Priority number one is to finish our capital projects that we’ve kicked off. We’re going to finish up our Arcadia Club as we speak with building a new teen center there. We had to replace the Gene Matthews Club in North Port, and we’re going to be starting construction soon on the new Steven and Marjolaine Townsend Campus. Then the Roy McBean Club is going to be completely rebuilt. For our campus that is on public housing property on 21st Street, there’ll be a partnership there with early childhood education with the YMCA Southwest, Florida. So it’s going to be a very exciting project, a true cradle to college-wide career program campus. It’ll be wonderful. We also want to expand our teen programs. As I mentioned, we’re building a teen center in Arcadia. All of our youth in the two county areas have access to our teen program.

SRQ

SRQ Magazine | October 2024: In Conversation with Innovation in Philanthropy