K21 CEO Highlights Work Of Foundation During Pandemic
July 23, 2020 at 12:14 a.m.
K21 CEO Highlights Work Of Foundation During Pandemic
By David [email protected]
Rich Haddad, K21 president and CEO, speaking at the weekly coronavirus press conference at Warsaw City Hall, said K21’s mission “is to really be for the benefit of Kosciusko County residents, to ensure health care services are provided and to advance prevention and healthy living. So, obviously, this crisis that we’re all working through, living through and challenged through is certainly in our mission.”
In more practical terms, he said K21 is here to provide funding for health and wellness needs and opportunities that impact Kosciusko County residents.
“Our board, in mid-March as this thing was starting to become known and realizing this was going to be a significant issue for our community, immediately approved $100,000 to really look for ways that we could help. So it was an open-ended $100,000 commitment that we made on the front end, and those funds have essentially played out in five different ways,” Haddad said.
First, K21 partnered with three other funders – Kosciusko County Community Foundation, United Way and the Zimmer Biomet Foundation – to “pool our money to immediately respond to basic needs in our county. That was mostly in food access and food availability to those who would have been immediately hit by loss of income and other effects of the crisis.”
The second wave of that partnership focused on residential services in the county, he said. “We realized that those responsible to house others were really going to face a difficult time and needed additional support. So the various residential services like group homes, addiction recovery homes, homeless shelters, those sort of places, we knew were going to face additional pressures to try to manage residential services,” he said.
K21 provided support for child care for health care and frontline workers. It had a pop-up child care center specifically for those families and employees that needed to work and needed some support in child care.
K21 also helped relocate Fellowship Missions, the local homeless shelter, to a safer camp environment so it could spread out, isolate those who had been exposed and welcome new clients that needed shelter.
PPE also was provided by K21 to the smaller police departments in the county.
“Finally, we responded to several nonprofits that came to us for COVID-related impact on their finances, whether it was a loss of the ability to have fundraisers or their programs were suspended for an indefinite amount of time and really lost programming,” Haddad said.
Going forward, K21’s focus has been to try to review and see if there’s a role K21 can play as schools plan their reopening.
“As a reminder, we have five schools that actually serve the kids of Kosciusko County. They’re not all sitting in our county, but you think about all the schools that serve Kosciusko kids, there’s actually five school systems that do that,” he said.
Those include Warsaw, Wawasee, Tippecanoe Valley, Whitko and Triton.
“So, again, as they look at the various sources that can help meet the needs they identified, similar to the nonprofits, I reached out to each of the superintendents and said, ‘We’re here for you. We want to be available and open to needs that you can’t meet in any other way. Again, tap into all those other resources if you can, obviously, but just know we’re here for you if some of those needs can’t be met and we can be of help,” Haddad said.
He said there’s been amazing community support for social services and nonprofits during the pandemic crisis.
“Our concern is, as this crisis lingers, and as we move out of the crisis, the issue of resilience – nonprofits being able to survive this, given their suspended or loss of income to support their missions – so it’s important that the missions and purposes of these nonprofits, which are very vital to the health of our community remain or survive in some way,” Haddad said. “So how do we deal with the resilience of these services? And then secondly is recovery. Obviously, survival is one thing but to get back to full impact and full support of those that need their services, how do we help them do that?”
Finally, he encouraged everyone in the community to remain generous and engaging.
“It’s been amazing to see our community in so many ways to step up and I just want to encourage you to keep doing that, keep responding, keep looking for ways that you can invest and support the needs around you,” Haddad said. “Secondly is to be responsible personally. It’s going to take all of us doing the right things together. I don’t think this is a political issue, this is an ‘us’ issue. And it’s important that we’re all responsible and living our lives in a way that’s responsible. And the last thing is to be respectful. We are one community, we all do care for each other.”
Rich Haddad, K21 president and CEO, speaking at the weekly coronavirus press conference at Warsaw City Hall, said K21’s mission “is to really be for the benefit of Kosciusko County residents, to ensure health care services are provided and to advance prevention and healthy living. So, obviously, this crisis that we’re all working through, living through and challenged through is certainly in our mission.”
In more practical terms, he said K21 is here to provide funding for health and wellness needs and opportunities that impact Kosciusko County residents.
“Our board, in mid-March as this thing was starting to become known and realizing this was going to be a significant issue for our community, immediately approved $100,000 to really look for ways that we could help. So it was an open-ended $100,000 commitment that we made on the front end, and those funds have essentially played out in five different ways,” Haddad said.
First, K21 partnered with three other funders – Kosciusko County Community Foundation, United Way and the Zimmer Biomet Foundation – to “pool our money to immediately respond to basic needs in our county. That was mostly in food access and food availability to those who would have been immediately hit by loss of income and other effects of the crisis.”
The second wave of that partnership focused on residential services in the county, he said. “We realized that those responsible to house others were really going to face a difficult time and needed additional support. So the various residential services like group homes, addiction recovery homes, homeless shelters, those sort of places, we knew were going to face additional pressures to try to manage residential services,” he said.
K21 provided support for child care for health care and frontline workers. It had a pop-up child care center specifically for those families and employees that needed to work and needed some support in child care.
K21 also helped relocate Fellowship Missions, the local homeless shelter, to a safer camp environment so it could spread out, isolate those who had been exposed and welcome new clients that needed shelter.
PPE also was provided by K21 to the smaller police departments in the county.
“Finally, we responded to several nonprofits that came to us for COVID-related impact on their finances, whether it was a loss of the ability to have fundraisers or their programs were suspended for an indefinite amount of time and really lost programming,” Haddad said.
Going forward, K21’s focus has been to try to review and see if there’s a role K21 can play as schools plan their reopening.
“As a reminder, we have five schools that actually serve the kids of Kosciusko County. They’re not all sitting in our county, but you think about all the schools that serve Kosciusko kids, there’s actually five school systems that do that,” he said.
Those include Warsaw, Wawasee, Tippecanoe Valley, Whitko and Triton.
“So, again, as they look at the various sources that can help meet the needs they identified, similar to the nonprofits, I reached out to each of the superintendents and said, ‘We’re here for you. We want to be available and open to needs that you can’t meet in any other way. Again, tap into all those other resources if you can, obviously, but just know we’re here for you if some of those needs can’t be met and we can be of help,” Haddad said.
He said there’s been amazing community support for social services and nonprofits during the pandemic crisis.
“Our concern is, as this crisis lingers, and as we move out of the crisis, the issue of resilience – nonprofits being able to survive this, given their suspended or loss of income to support their missions – so it’s important that the missions and purposes of these nonprofits, which are very vital to the health of our community remain or survive in some way,” Haddad said. “So how do we deal with the resilience of these services? And then secondly is recovery. Obviously, survival is one thing but to get back to full impact and full support of those that need their services, how do we help them do that?”
Finally, he encouraged everyone in the community to remain generous and engaging.
“It’s been amazing to see our community in so many ways to step up and I just want to encourage you to keep doing that, keep responding, keep looking for ways that you can invest and support the needs around you,” Haddad said. “Secondly is to be responsible personally. It’s going to take all of us doing the right things together. I don’t think this is a political issue, this is an ‘us’ issue. And it’s important that we’re all responsible and living our lives in a way that’s responsible. And the last thing is to be respectful. We are one community, we all do care for each other.”
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