Harbor Interfaith Holds Annual Fundraiser Online

The South Bay Auxiliary of Harbor Interfaith Services is hosting a fundraiser for the charity’s Children’s Center from April 25 to 29. It will be held using a silent auction online, with more than 70 prizes up for bid.

The auxiliary normally holds an in-person fundraiser every year, but because of the pandemic, this year’s event will be virtual, as was last year’s.

The fundraiser is just for the general operation of the center, said Nancy Roebuck, president of the auxiliary. The center’s budget is between $450,000 to $500,000 per year, and a portion of that comes from the auxiliary’s fundraising.

“The Children’s Center is supported only by private donations,” Roebuck said. “There’s no grant money from government organizations.”

At last year’s fundraiser, the auxiliary raised about $185,000, said Kathy Siegel, a member of the auxiliary. This was in part thanks to Kennedy Health Services, which donated $100,000, Roebuck said.

“Last year was unusual,” Siegel said. “We’re certainly striving for as much as possible. The years prior to that we were [at] $100,000.”

The auxiliary is composed of 15 women, all volunteers.

Harbor Interfaith has a variety of services that help homeless people, or people on the brink of homelessness. This includes shelter, transitional housing and job placement, as well as the children’s center. All the children at the center have parents that use Harbor Interfaith’s other services.

“It’s not a separate daycare center that anybody can come into,” Siegel said. “This is really an integral part of the success of parents either getting higher education, [or] going out and securing jobs.”

The center takes in children from six weeks old to school age. It has an infant and toddler care room, and a preschool room with a curriculum. Roebuck said that children graduate from the preschool program ready for kindergarten.

In addition, the center has an after-school kids’ club, and Harbor Interfaith has vans that pick up the children from their schools to take them to the center. The club has tutors that help the children with their homework. The children are allowed to stay there until 6 p.m. The club accepts children up to 17 years old, but most are from grade school to the beginning of middle school.

The pandemic had a big impact on the operation of the center, especially when schools shut down in 2020.

“The after-school kids, who are in a population that maybe don’t have Wi-Fi at home or internet access, or the hardware, were severely impacted when they couldn’t go to school at all,” Roebuck said. “That space was turned into a classroom, and Harbor Interfaith Services bought computers and headphones and hired a certified elementary school teacher to supervise them.”

The center also has a chef who prepares healthy meals and snacks.

The center is licensed for up to 80 children, but the number of children enrolled fluctuates.

“As people get into housing, it might not be geographically available to them anymore,” Roebuck said.

Roebuck said that the center is in a secure location within a building operated by Harbor Interfaith, and a badge is needed to get in.

“Some of these families are fleeing domestic abuse,” Roebuck said. “There’s custody issues sometimes.”

The auxiliary has existed since 2007, and previously it raised money for Harbor Interfaith in general. It decided to focus its efforts on the Children’s Center about six years ago, when its members learned that the center only operated on privately raised money.

Sometimes the center does not charge for its services.

“The people that have their children there pay only what they can afford,” Roebuck said. “And sometimes that’s zero. But they try to make sure that if they can afford something, they pay something, just to feel an investment in the place.”

While the 2021 fundraiser was online, the auxiliary did not host a fundraiser in 2020 due to the pandemic.

“That was really challenging,” Siegel said. “We tried other ways to just generate fundraising.”

This entailed reaching out to people and asking them to donate.

For this year’s fundraiser, all prizes up for auction were donated.

“All of us do our best to reach out to people that we do business with, local businesses, restaurants that we go to,” Siegel said.

The fundraiser is at www.hisauxiliary.org