Plans are underway to turn the former Statesman Journal building in downtown Salem into a one-stop shop for community services, including youth programming, health services and religious charities. As recently covered by the Salem Reporter, the project is moving forward after receiving $3 million from state lawmakers. The current plan is for storage company StoreIT to buy the building and occupy the subfloor, while nonprofits and community organizations rent space on upper floors.
Tim Sinatra is the CEO of the Family YMCA of Marion and Polk counties, which is spearheading the project. He joins us with more details.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with plans for a kind of Swiss Army knife of social services in downtown Salem, a one-stop shop for people in need. The idea is to turn the former Statesman Journal building into a site that houses a vast array of community services all under one roof. As a Salem reporter wrote recently, the project is moving forward after receiving $3 million from state lawmakers. Tim Sinatra is the CEO of the Family YMCA of Marion and Polk Counties, which is spearheading this project and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Tim Sinatra: Thanks, Dave, excited to be here.
Miller: It’s good to have you on. Where did the idea for this initially come from?
Sinatra: This is one of those dream opportunities, when working in social services for so many years, that you always thought about and came to fruition just by chance where we were building our new flagship YMCA building and the building right next to it was a Statesman Journal building that hadn’t been occupied for many years. And people would constantly ask, “What’s gonna happen with that?” And we really didn’t have an answer. And suddenly I was challenged to think about what might happen with that, and came up with this integrated service delivery approach. Then what was very interesting was we called together about 25-30 nonprofit, city, county business leaders and ran by them this idea of what if we could co-locate many different nonprofits to really address the community’s needs, so that we can really reduce many of the barriers that prevent our community members from receiving those needs.
[After] about an hour and a half presentation, we did what we call “fist to five,” where you hold up a fist, which means horrible idea, you shouldn’t do it, to five, [which means] absolutely. And anything in between. I said, if we have a three and above, as an average, we can put an exploratory team together. And it was a 4.2. And I’ve never seen that many leaders, within an hour and a half, agree on the same thing in my 34 years in social services.
Miller: That’s very specific. How do you know it was 4.2?
Sinatra: We took a picture of the room just to validate it and counted everybody’s hands.
Miller: Counted all the fives and fours. And what were you expecting, maybe not numerically… but when you presented this idea to these various social service agency leaders, what did you think you would hear?
Sinatra: The biggest concern when you’re doing something like that is whether everyone sees the bigger picture, because there’s funding issues. Sometimes there’s duplication of services. Everyone worries about silos and sometimes that type of stuff prevents the greater good from happening. And Marion and Polk counties are pretty amazing, where they see the bigger picture and the greater need for the community. So I didn’t expect that level of agreement and interest in moving forward. But it just showed the heart of our community.
Miller: Although, even with that support, you still actually have to make it happen. Where did you go from there?
Sinatra: Well, the next thing was really looking at how we could obtain that building, from a community perspective. And we were really lucky in the fact that StoreIT, which is a storage company, was ready to buy that. And all they wanted to do was use the bottom floor of it, which wasn’t really the greatest space. But they just wanted to build micro storage lockers in there, especially with all the small apartment housing in downtown Salem. They saw it as a great market but didn’t know what to do with the top floor, which is about 41,000 square feet. Then the broker told him to come see me about this. We called it the Block of Humanity and told them about the dream and they said, “We’re in, we’ll help you do it.” And that’s where it started.
Miller: This is unusual, maybe not unprecedented, but an unusual combination of having this for-profit company, in this case a storage company, be renting out the floor level space to all these nonprofits or government agencies. What do you see as what you have in common? Or how do you imagine that relationship?
Sinatra: Well, what we have in common is the welfare of our community and really increasing the quality of our entire community. I think the excitement of the relationship is that we’re doing it from a strength-based approach. So we’re really saying [is] what are the key needs in our community? And what organizations can meet those needs and really come together in the same location and really provide these different services?
Many families have a complex need. Many individuals and youth have complex needs. And by the time they go to their third or fourth referral for different services, sometimes they don’t get there because of many of the barriers that prevent them. So the holistic nature and meeting and supporting our families, youth, and adults can be challenged just by that. So if you can make it easier, that would be the case. But even better than that, right next door to the building is the main transit station. So all roads go through there. So to a certain extent, we eliminate the barriers of transportation, which was a main factor of why that spot was so important.
Miller: What are some of the organizations or nonprofits that have already committed to this project?
Sinatra: So there’s three ways you can get committed to this project. You might put your base location there. We have one organization that is going to leave their current location and put their whole base location in there. We have others who wanna put satellite offices in there. Others want to use the projected flexible space to do workshops and seminars and health fairs and things like that, to help serve the populations they’re serving. So those were the functional areas that nonprofits got involved in. But we have everyone from Oregon Department of Human Services to CASA, Catholic Community Services, Boys and Girls Club, Chemeketa Community College. We have over 20 different nonprofits that are ready to get engaged in one of those levels.
Miller: Is there a model for this kind of all-in-one social services center somewhere else in Oregon or in some other state that you can model this after?
Sinatra: Not to the extent that we’re working on. There’s usually a couple of nonprofits co-located together, but not to this extent. Interesting enough, the “U.S. Playbook to Address Social Determinants of Health” came out last November. They’re talking about how they can really address the social determinants more effectively. And if you read that, there are three pillars in it: expanding data gathering and sharing, supporting flexible funding for social needs, and having a backbone organization bringing everyone together. So it’s interesting, we didn’t know they were working on this. We’ve been working on this for about 20 months, in the design phase. And then this playbook comes out to endorse that from what they’re seeing across the nation. This is the future approach.
Miller: So I’m curious about the mechanism that you’re envisioning here. Because, in a sense, one of the things you’re saying is that the sum of this for clients is going to be greater than just the sum of the parts. Just walk us through what you think – how people might use this center when it’s fully up and running?
Sinatra: Many different ways. And that’s one of the greatest aspects of it. Because we have so many different supports and resources there, we can meet a multitude of needs. One of the main goals, Dave, is what happens in the social impact pyramid. The highest part of the pyramid is intervention, the middle is prevention, and the bottom is asset building. And what you want to do is keep anyone out of the intervention [part]. For instance, using the emergency room as your primary care provider for people who become houseless. And there’s a domino effect in the social impact world where one domino falls, for instance a single parent’s radiator goes south. But because that’s “gray-area funding,” they can’t get to their job. They lose their job and then maybe healthcare goes next. And then rent and food and then they’re houseless.
This is made to stop the dominoes from compounding one to two to three. We want to stop it right away and we need things in real time, not a month from now, when there’s an appointment. Not in three months when a board makes a decision to help “gray area funding.” We want to create a mechanism that can move in as close to real time as the needs of our community members. And that’s the main goal. So it just depends what they come with.
If we can’t solve it there, we’re connected because the brilliance of it is really a hub-and-spoke model. That’s a hub. But you still have the other non profits that have their bases all around that can dig in even deeper and even cross over to intervention if needed, based on their specialties.
Miller: So if the only way what you’re describing would really work…especially if the biggest idea here is that people can access all different kinds of services in one place and maybe they’d go in for the radiator. But while they’re there, the person who’s helping them says it seems like you could also use some help in some other way. The only way that’s really gonna work is if all the different non profits or agencies are truly talking to each other, which doesn’t necessarily happen because they’re colocating. There are plenty of businesses where different siloed departments are in the same building. But because of the structure of the organization, they don’t really interact. They don’t really know each other. They don’t share processes.
How are you going to make it socially, within these different organizations, possible that they can actually work together in ways that help other people?
Sinatra: It’s interesting. It’s a great question. When we first came together in that first meeting a little over 20 months ago, the first thing we said was, “If you’re coming here, we’re hoping you’re coming here to give not to get,” because that’s the mindset that’s gonna help us achieve what needs to be achieved in this new approach, at least for our community. And one of the things when I asked everybody why [they were] all so interested in this, I’ve never seen that many leaders stay on board and be on board that long as we got the funding from the State to get this going. One was reducing the overhead cost because it’s a shared infrastructure. We reduced the barrier of transportation and the connections of multiple resources.
But in the end, they said the most important part of this is exactly your question. They said, if our frontline team members who do the most important work with our community members can connect closer – and they’re literally, eating lunch in the lunchroom, maybe they’re on an advisory committee continuing to look at the service delivery model to make sure it’s working fine, being able to walk a family over into another office to help accelerate outcomes. They love the fact that if they work at that level, if relationships can build at that level, it’s much faster to get things done than at the CEO level for the community member who needs support. And that’s what got them most excited about it. And I was surprised that everybody agreed. That was the most important aspect, even more than saving costs because there’ll be a very, very low lease rate to be in there.
Miller: When I think about the YMCA, I think about a pretty wide array of potential services or activities. But recreation is often included in that. We’ve been talking about social services, but is there any kind of community activity or recreation component to your vision for this center?
Sinatra: Absolutely. We all feel that it’s just not a place for social services. It’s a place you want to be. Because we’ll have different seminars, family engagement opportunities, health fairs. Part of the warehouse portion of it, we, at the YMCA, will be programming to expand teen services and family engagement opportunities, a place where families will want to go on a Friday and Saturday night to really have some healthy opportunities to spend with each other at little to no cost, if anything. The other thing is we want opportunities like Chemeketa Community College, maybe doing some of their courses or GED classes there because it may be more accessible, and there’s other resources there.
And we’re planning to have respite care too. Many times, families who want to come to financial literacy or how to buy your first home seminars can’t. Because they can’t find childcare or it may [cost] too much. So we want to provide respite care for families when they’re coming so that the children are having a great time in a wonderful environment. And the families can really focus on some of the things that are going to help them in their future. And so yes, it’s a blend of both social services but asset-building opportunities to strengthen families in our community in general.
Miller: How would this hub be different from the Navigation Center that opened last summer that’s specifically to help people experiencing homelessness, but has an all-in -one idea for that kind of intervention?
Sinatra: Sure, it’s a great question. So the Navigation Center focuses really on the homeless population, with the immediate need there. That would be in the top of the pyramid of intervention, where our service array comes in the level down, which would be prevention and then asset-building. So our goal is, when they get out of the Navigation Center, [to offer] supports to help sustain their progress. We would then be able to do that through this colocation of these services.
A lot of times in social services, you’ll get help. But if you don’t have consistency of help to keep building that momentum, sometimes all the great work can be undone pretty quickly. And so we want to make sure there’s a continuum of care that’s built into the coordination, not just with the Navigation Center and this location, but with all the other nonprofits in our community, to be more effective in delivering services.
Miller: But that center could run out of funding by next year. We’ve talked a fair amount on this show, over the last year, about the pretty dire fiscal picture that the city is facing right now and the thwarted efforts so far to deal with that. If that were to happen and the Navigation Center that just opened were to close down, what would that mean for the work that you’re trying to do broadly?
Sinatra: Yeah, I can’t speak specifically to where that would go. I think a lot of the partners who engage in those level of services, similar to the Navigation Center, would probably coordinate to
see how they can step up and fill the gap. Our focus would still stay the same. If we can close the front door on houselessness and those extreme intervention measures as a goal, hopefully we can limit that and it reduces the budget they have long-term. But yes, that’s a reality. I would think our community is good at trying to at least find something to make a mitigation effort towards that if that was the case.
Miller: What is the potential timeline for this hub?
Sinatra: I would say in the next eight to 12 months, they’ll be doing some renovations inside, where we’ll get the top floor. They’ll be building out the storage in the bottom floor and we’ll start with some of the base location members joining in. But the neat thing is that the money is helping design to suit that nonprofit who’s coming in. So depending on the type of space and what that space would be, we would design a great space for them to operate. Sometimes they just need four or five offices. Sometimes it’s four or five offices with a little bit bigger open area space, and so on. So we’re starting to have those discussions now. And we’re excited to see this going. But some of our partners, if we opened the doors today, they would walk in today.
Miller: So, you got this $3 million grant from the legislature. Do you still need to raise more money to fully realize this vision?
Sinatra: The $3 million helps us in a phased approach. We’ll start phasing in the priorities to get this going. We’re still looking for other funding but this is enough to get us going. We realize that, from all of the support and interest we continue to receive on this, we feel there’s a good option to get closer to the funding we need but, in no way, is this going to delay the start of it.
Miller: Let’s zoom forward a couple of years. Let’s say this is all up and running and you’re walking around one day as a kind of undercover CEO. I know you’re not in charge of all these organizations, but you’re the convenor at this point. What would you be looking for to decide for yourself whether or not this whole idea is working?
Sinatra: Probably a few things. The first thing we would develop is how we measure success. And I think that’s a collective discussion with all the partners and community leaders and community members, getting everyone in the same room and deciding what that is and building a community scorecard. Having a scorecard that we can measure against our progress and achievements and even the gaps, so we can address those. And I think progress in any of the areas of need is key. Trying hard isn’t good enough. We want to do what’s right and get results. There’s no doubt about that. So I would say, first of all, we would have a community scorecard that would be making progress against those metrics. The second is that it would be viewed as a place to be. The community members, families, adults, seniors would want to come there for the resources, support, the engagement, the asset building opportunities, and it’s a fun place where people see it as a little oasis of support, community at its best. And that’s what I’d want to see.
Miller: Tim Sinatra, thanks very much.
Sinatra: Thank you. It was a pleasure Dave.
Miller: Tim Sinatra is the CEO of the Family YMCA of Marion and Polk counties. They are the organization that is spearheading this new effort for an all-in-one social services and community center in downtown Salem.
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