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VOLUME 25 ISSUE 45 / NOVEMBER , 2021 / THE SOURCE WEEKLY
More than Just Child Care
MountainStar Family Relief Nursery offers needed services for families on the margins
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By Nicole Vulcan
Mention child care in Central Oregon and someone is bound to remark about the vast shortage of available spots for kids in the area. The advent of the pandemic only made that shortage more acute, with some of the region’s most vulnerable families forced to put kids in lessthan-ideal care, to stay home and face the economic impacts of reducing their work hours, or to make countless other tough and stressful decisions around parenting and child care.
With a mission “to prevent child abuse and neglect through community support and therapeutic services,” MountainStar Family Relief Nursery aims to ease some of those burdens for families in need. Providing daycare and preschool is part of that equation, but it’s not the nonprofit’s only concern.
“A lot of people have this misconception that we’re just a child care or daycare for the kiddos, not realizing the work that we do with the parents and the kiddos who have had adverse childhood experiences,” said Raisa Hisatake, who works with infants as an interventionist. She and other team members work with children ages birth to age five, providing enrichment and fun in MountainStar classrooms, while also providing support to families in the way of home visits, parent coaching and goal setting, basic needs like diapers and more. Watching parents slowly gain parenting as well as life skills has been very rewarding, Hisatake said. “I am working with a family—initially she [the mother] started the program for a very particular reason, and she was very reluctant in forming relationships with other adults as well as the teachers in the classroom. She was very uncomfortable with her kiddo being in the classroom because the kiddo was just in the ‘bubble wrap,’” Hisatake told the Source. “After a couple months working with her, we see so much difference in her demeanor. She’s going out there, forming relationships with other adults, she’s more comfortable having her kiddo here four times a week, and you can just see the parenting guidance that we provide for them is tremendously helping her with her relationship with her kiddo.”
Dyana Osegueda, a bilingual interventionist, performs a similar role as Hisatake, serving Spanish-speaking families. For Osegueda, who was a 5th-grade teacher prior to working at MountainStar, the work has allowed her to grow personally and professionally.
“We’re welcome into their homes, and that takes a lot,” Osegueda said. “Just the things that they share with us… they’re being very honest, very open. They’re vulnerable, and they’re here on a volunteer basis. They come here because they need the help. To be able to provide that assistance… honestly, it just makes me want to continue learning more so I can provide even better service to them.”
MountainStar has been providing services to Central Oregon families since 2001, starting with infants and younger children in Bend. It has since opened facilities in Prineville, Madras, Redmond and La Pine. In 2017, it added a preschool program for four and five-year-olds. And in 2020, MountainStar opened three classrooms under Preschool Promise, the publicly funded preschool system created by the Oregon Department of Education’s Early Learning Division, providing classes for families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level.
Offering this wealth of services— funded primarily through donations from the local community—has been a special experience, Hisatake said.
“I just see the dedication, the effort the educators here, working with kids with special needs,” she said. “I just love the community, the diversity, the inclusivity that we offer to the kiddos and the families.”
Ella Taft
Bethlehem Inn’s Project Turnkey motel conversion has been a community-wide effort
By Nicole Vulcan
Bethlehem Inn is weeks away from opening its new shelter in the former Greenway Motel on NW Birch Avenue in Redmond, according to Executive Director Gwenn Wysling.
Astatewide program that converts old motels into shelters for people without homes was a novel idea for many Oregonians when it debuted during the pandemic—but Bethlehem Inn has been in that business for quite some time. The nonprofit turned a motel on the old Highway 97 in Bend into a shelter in 2007, bringing a much-needed respite from the elements for unhoused people in Central Oregon. Now, through funds from the state’s Project Turnkey, it’s doing it again—this time in Redmond, where there are currently no permanent shelter beds.
Shepherd’s House and participating churches have operated a winter warming shelter in Redmond in years past, but it’s historically moved around to various churches and has only been open on the coldest nights. While Shepherd’s House continues to work through the details of opening a permanent 30+ bed shelter in a former church, Bethlehem Inn is hard at work in converting the former Greenway Motel in downtown Redmond into a shelter with 14 rooms for up to 88 people. Bethlehem Inn received a $2.7 million grant from Project Turnkey, one of 12 projects slated to be funded in the state.
“Because it’s its [Redmond’s] first shelter, it’s going to have a life of its own,” said Gwenn Wysling, executive director of Bethlehem Inn. “We have the same rules, the same guidelines—we’ve learned so much over the years. I think the biggest difference really is that we won’t have families at this time.”
What was recently a functioning 1950s-era motel operated by a local family has required plenty of overhauling to turn it into a shelter, Wysling said. Firewall boards needed to
Nicole Vulcan be added between each room. Several ground-floor rooms needed to be converted to be Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant. Other rooms were opened up to become the community room, and eventually, a commercial kitchen. What Wysling jokingly calls “the pool” on the roof is not really a swimming pool; it’s an accumulation of water that signals the old motel is going to need a new roof. To be able to allow families at the Redmond shelter, Bethlehem Inn will need to make room for a second dining facility, if possible.
Project Turnkey funds got things rolling, but other partners have been integral in keeping the project moving, Wysling said.
“Thankfully, the county came through, the city has helped us out with some grant funding, so the partnerships are there. It takes a community that’s willing to support that,” Wysling said. “It’s one thing to just buy it and have it. It’s another thing to run it.”
Initially slated to open in August, Wysling and her team now hope to open the Redmond location in the next several weeks—ideally by Thanksgiving— starting with the rooms and later the commercial kitchen space.
