DoorwaysVA Blog

Community partners come together to purchase Doorways second shelter.

When I first came to Doorways as Executive Director in March 2003 I was faced with a serious cash flow and structural funding crisis … payroll was barely being met, numerous business functions were unfunded, and programs were eroding such as our services to children.  I immediately prepared a historic cash flow analysis going back 10 years to identify the trends of where our support went awry.  It was clear that Arlington County’s level of support had dipped from 50% of the shelter costs to 25% of costs.  This serious contraction was confirmed when a long time senior county employee commented, “we’ve been wondering why Doorways hasn’t been asking for increased money all these years.”  My response was … “well this Executive Director will be asking now, we need the County’s support.”  I also researched how “shelters” are funded locally, regionally and nationally – whether homeless or domestic violence in nature.   I wanted to be sure Doorways support from the County was consistent with how other “shelters” sustained themselves.   What I learned was the vast majority of shelters were sustained with 75%-95% public government funding.

I find it remarkable that for 30 years Doorways has operated its shelters with at best 50% county funding.  It’s a reflection of its beginnings … community activists establishing a need and putting the resources together to open the Safehouse, then the Family Home.  However,  we are once again at a place where having only 27% of the Family Home and Safehouse expenses funded by the County is posing a tremendous operating shortfall for our future years.  We are projecting a $350,000 shelter operating  shortfall.

In the next blogs, I’ll share why after eight years of growing programs and infrastructure and garnering an exponential growth of private funders, we are facing yet again a significant structural funding challenge to our two shelters.  And, why we need to look to Arlington County to step up and be a greater partner with our many private funders.