This morning was my third talk to a Carey Chapel Service in the past few weeks. This was the best talk of the 3 – and we clearly have another 10% of the Carey community well on board, and well intrigued too, with what we are on about. I have not heard to date how many $$$ were raised from sending round the plate – but I do look forward to hearing this information! The staff of this particular house, Fullard, seemed particularly keen to visit our houses to fully understand what we do and to see where there might be some student input.
Monday
Today’s work highlights have included a working lunch with Connie as we plan for Team Servants ’14, a successful interview with a very vulnerable lady at Romana, coffee and general planning chat with North Balwyn Rotary President elect and great friend of Servants – Adrian Ransom, a long chat with our own esteemed President about all things inside the Servants box (see what I did there?! Clever eh?!), a tour of Romana for an interested individual – who was amazed at the quality of the facility and planning with Amanda for several occurring issues whilst she is away in Central Australia and the N.T. from tomorrow for a week. Throw in way too many emails and phone calls and all in all it has been a pretty good day!
Filling Romana
As of right now 13 of the 24 places at Romana have been accepted/filled. I have another list with half a dozen folks on it who I will probably interview again or offer accommodation to at Hamer or Carrical. Interviews continue at pace in the week ahead. I am now beyond the idea of being ‘hopeful’ that we will be ready to occupy Romana with good people from Opening Day. It is now a fact. The only thing we will once again be short of is enough facilities/beds to house those who want to live with Servants.
Also!! We will officially be housing at least one Slovenian!!! And, believe this or not, his name is Roman!
The Week Ahead
The week ahead is looking, even by Servants own excessive standards, HUGE!! I am very glad to say that all diary entries for the week are, right now, occurrences that are to be looked forward to!
Surrender review
The Surrender conference ended today. I think we had a brilliant day on Friday, an ok day Saturday and a terrific end day today. All in all it was a highly worthwhile experience; an investment of a vast number of mine and Amanda’s hours (especially going into evenings and the weekend) and a few $$$ invested too. I believe the fruits we will harvest as a result of this weekend will be profound as we progress – particularly developing a relationship with Urban Seed, and to a lesser extent Cornerstone and Prison Fellowship Australia. There will be some contact from at least a couple of churches along the way too.
We created a fancy new banner for the event and the Anthology book continues to be worth its weight in gold as a means of introducing Servants to folks. We gave away about 150 copies across the weekend and a couple of people have requested that we send further multiple copies on to their churches/networks etc.
All in all it was a very interesting, quite eye opening, experience.
And they’re off!
The builders are off the leash and have started at Romana. After just 24 hours the front part of the house is well and truly a building site. It’s fantastic!! I must admit there have many days/nights over the past year that I wondered if we would ever see this day! Good news!
Surrendering. HCC. Cocktails. Narrative. $$$$. Please read.
Live Pulsing for your viewing pleasure ladies and gentleman! Here I sit at the Surrender conference, bored, missing Dennis’ funeral (Amanda is there) so that I can talk to folks about our work and, hopefully, find people who will be interested in joining the Servants family in some way. Have already made a stunning connection that might well lead to a constant source of future House Managers – all of whom would be Christian and with a great desire to serve. Exciting!
I have mentioned in Pulse of late about the developing Servants/Hawthorn Community Chest relationship. This has been going great guns. Yesterday their CEO informed me that Servants has been chosen by HCC as the recipient of raised funds from their upcoming President’s Cocktail Party. This is insane! I am too fearful to think how many $$$$ might be forthcoming from 180 invited guests!
Yesterday the first interviews began for the Narrative book. It was an exhilarating session as the 2 Xavier authors, James and Hamish, spent an hour with Juan from Carrical. It was everything I had hoped and expected it to be – and more!!
I am planning on printing 20,000 copies of Narrative. To date we have printed 5300 and 5000 copies of Anthology. I believe the time is right to print significantly more copies of the follow-up book. As such I suggest that we concentrate all incoming donation and fundraising $$$ for this year into the costs of funding Narrative. I anticipate that over the course of the year we will see significantly more $$$ coming in via donations and fundraising than we will require for costs associated with Narrative.
Funeral arrangements for Dennis
The funeral of Dennis Donovan will be at Le Pine, 741 High Street, Kew East, this coming Friday, commencing at 10.30am. All are welcome and a morning tea follows the service.
The longest
Saturday night at Carrical witnessed the longest Community Dinner of ALL Time! These auspicious occasions usually commence at 5.45pm and finish no later than 8.30pm. Last night we decided to pull up stumps at 10.30pm. Expect great things to occur as a result of this Dinner!
20,000,000 bathroom tiles
Ok, there may not be quite 20,000,000 tiles @ Romana in the bathrooms – but there are a lot! It has come to our attention of late that the majority of the bathroom tiles are in poor condition – they have, after all, been doing their job for the past 30 years or so. A finance sub committee decision was taken that Servants should pay for the tiling repairs to be carried out. Quotes have been obtained and a tiler will be engaged immediately to start this body of work.
Invite
I have been invited to be a guest speaker at the upcoming Boroondara Council Social & Community Housing forum. A nice invitation to receive – still working out whether to accept the invitation or not.
Mount Evelyn Christian School
Last Monday evening I had the privilege of talking to the Year 9 cohort of MECS about the work of Servants. This was as a part of the students ‘City Camp.’ It was a terrific evening and quite clearly the basis of a very sound relationship between Servants and MECS has been formed. The students were really engaged with what I had to tell them about Servants/community/making a difference/the folks we house etc. They were particularly engrossed with some of the ‘horror’ stories I was willing to share with them! It was wonderful at the end when a student prayed for all of us involved with the work of Servants.
The week in Romana
Roll on 7.00am next Wednesday morning. Yours truly should be onsite to take the first pics of demolition/preps occurring there. This week has seen the last few documents being signed/red tape cut thru etc in preparation for next Wednesday. How exciting that after all this time we are actually about to alter the building!
Interviews have continued this week with some more wonderful candidates appearing. The decision to make Romana an alcohol free house appears at this stage to be paying off handsomely. There are just so many prospective resos who want to live in a ‘dry’ house. I now have 10 people definitely moving in – and another half dozen whom I am considering/will invite back for further talks/might house elsewhere. 24 rooms is not enough! The word on the street from workers is that the need is becoming still more chronic. At one stage we wondered if charging $560 per fortnight was an amount that people would refuse to pay. From what I am currently seeing and hearing we could be charging significantly more than this (not that I am advocating for this at all) and people would still be lining up to be housed by us.
For the first time ever today I witnessed a worker in tears (in a good way) as her client was interviewed. Slightly disconcerting as you can imagine she later explained that Servants is unique and treats people with such respect. Good to hear. I hope that this enormously encourages all staff and committee.
Finance and Risk subcommittee meetings
Monday night the finance and risk subcommittees met. They were both great meetings.
Community Building Sub-Committee
The CBSC met on Thursday of this week. Some significant decisions were reached. One of these was not to host a Servants Breakfast event in May to launch Team Servants ’14. Another was to provide funds from our CCB ‘residents employment and training’ budget towards a laptop for one of our resos. It was also agreed to host a Carols @ Carrical evening in December to help raise funds for the work and mission of Hawthorn Community Chest.
Can’t get enough …………
The interest in our work from Carey continues to grow. Having been chosen by 2 of their 10 houses as the charity of choice for 2014 I was approached by a 3rd house a couple of days ago to talk at their upcoming chapel service. And why not?! Seems the Carey theme this year of ‘making a difference’ means that we are loved! I speak there again a week on Tuesday. I have been informed that on average each house raises $6000 per annum for their chosen charity. This should put us somewhere in the 18k minimum bracket over the course of the year – and probably significantly more.
Friday update
2 more places have been offered and accepted at Romana.
A new resident, Wayne, moved into Carrical today to replace Dennis. Carrical remains a very somber place at present as the community there comes to terms with the passing of Dennis.
8 months thru the fin year now and we have to date totaled 24 empty room nights across Carrical and Hamer.
The collections from the 2 recently held Chapel Services @ Carey brought in slightly over $2500 for Servants.
Bunnings, Rotary, Deloitte and Carey are among the absolute embarrassment of riches we have at our disposal to help get Romana ready for Opening Day.
The need for additional housing in Boroondara for those on low incomes is becoming still greater. Word from workers at the present time is that this is the worst they have ever seen – they are almost falling over one another to have their clients housed at Romana.
Narrative project has enjoyed a very positive week. To day I met with Epicure, the caterer for the launch. Next week I meet again with Southern Color to discuss prices/paper grades etc. An additional school this week joined the cast of writers. All exciting stuff.
A team from the Justice Dept has chosen Servants as their charity of choice for this year. Nice!
Servants is, mostly, a happening, fun place to be around at the present time!
Death
There was a death at Carrical this evening. Dennis Donovan, 71, died onsite at about 8.00pm having collapsed, presumably with a massive heart attack, at about 6.45pm. Paramedics worked so hard to revive Dennis (having replaced Amanda and residents when they turned up) but eventually had to accept the inevitable. Dennis had been at Carrical for at least 16 years – he was there as I started in 1998. A very gentle man who said very little but was greatly respected Dennis will be greatly missed. So very sad to see one more of the real old timers at Carrical pass away. It is some consolation that he died in his home and that he was surrounded by folks whom I think Dennis called his family.
Female!!
Great excitement today as I offered a Romana place to a FEMALE OF THE SPECIES! What’s more, she accepted the place! This is great news! Her name is Natalie and I think she is going to add greatly to the Romana community as it establishes.
Also of excitement today, but not quite as exciting as knowing that we will have at least one female reso from Opening Day @ Romana, was interviewing a guy, Wayne, who will also be a terrific reso once Romana commences.
Harvard Club of Victoria
Monday evening I attended an info session hosted by HCoV for scholarships to Harvard for the course I want to study later this year – Strategic Perspectives for Not For Profits. It was a terrific session with a couple of former scholarship recipients sharing their experiences. I am very keen to study this course – but feel quite doubtful in regards to being offered a scholarship. Warren and I now need to establish whether I should invest time into applying for a scholarship. The key criteria that would probably work against me successfully applying would be 1) my distinct lack of involvement in the broader framework of housing within Victoria and 2) the operational budget of Servants is significantly less than what they are looking for. Warren and I will discuss and let you know of our decision in due course.