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The town of Goshen held its second public hearing on the proposed community center on May 23 and members of the community got to hear from some of the nonprofits who are hoping to be able to utilize space in the proposed building to expand services they already offer to citizens of Goshen and the surrounding communities.
“As you all well know, it can be pretty difficult to access those kinds of services here in Goshen and while we do have service providers who are actively trying to provide as much access [as they can, and] to bring those services to Goshen, having a dedicated space would really allow them to provide more and better and more consistent service right here in town,” said Jeremy Crute, regional planner with the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission during his introductory remarks. “It’s really about trying to improve the quality of life here in Goshen by making sure that these services are available right here.”
Lindsey Pérez, executive director for the Rockbridge Area Relief Association, Jerri Schaff executive director for the Valley Program for Aging Services, Debbi Ratliff, adult services system manager for the Rockbridge Regional Library and Stuart Fargiano, director of dental services for the Rockbridge Area Health Center all spoke about the services they could offer Goshen with space in the proposed community center.
In addition to the town’s branch of the regional library system, the other organizations are also currently providing some services to the town.
VPAS recently began offering regular cafés for area residents, which include a meal and some sort of craft or activity for attendees, RARA has a mobile food pantry that comes to the town once a month and RAHC recently began utilizing mobile clinics, which have made one trip to Goshen already and have more trips scheduled in the future. All of the organizations, though, said they could offer more services to the community with a permanent location in town.
“We want to make sure that everybody who could benefit from our services is able to easily access them,” Pérez said. “Anyone who’s gone to the grocery store lately knows how expensive food is getting and [sometimes] it’s just really hard to work that with your budget, and we want to be there for people so they’re not making the decision between eating and buying medication or keeping the lights on.”
RARA, she said, hopes to use some space in the community center to have a small pantry with shelfstable food (and possibly refrigerated and frozen items if there’s enough space) for people to come to if they need additional food in between visits from the mobile food pantry, or if they’re unable to come on the day the mobile pantry is in town.
Schaff said that VPAS was dedicated to having a case worker come to Goshen at least once a month if the community center was built and they had space there. They’d also have someone come over at least once a week during the Medicare open enrollment season between Oct. 15 and Dec. 7 each year to help people enroll with Medicare. Additionally, she said that VPAS’ space in the building would be shared by other non-profits that serve the area that the CSPDC covers, including Blue Ridge Legal Services, Enroll Virginia and the Central Shenandoah Health District.
“We can’t be here five days a week. We don’t have the capacity to do that and neither do they, and we are committed to sharing our office space with them,” Schaff said. “We each only need one desk and a locking file cabinet and we can share that office space and get folks who are in this part of the world those services on a regular basis … It seems to us to make a lot of sense to double-up on that space and get those services here too and bring us to you folks rather than asking you folks to come to us.”
Fargiano noted that, when the health center’s mobile clinics came to Goshen earlier in the month, there was a good turnout on both days, calling that a “great catalyst” for establishing services in the community with hopes of eventually having a more permanent place to set up.
“You’d already have patients who know the program and can have services right in a fixed building here, which would be ideal,” he said. “We look forward to this opportunity. We hope it goes through.”
The library is the only one of the service providers that currently has a brick-and-mortar location in town and as such is utilized most, Ratliff noted. People come in looking, not just for books, but for information on everything from medical resources to filing their taxes.
“Our main goal is to be information professionals,” she said. “When people come in with problems, we want to know what resources are available [and] we want to help them learn how to judge information sources.”
The library also holds regular programs, including poetry readings and author talks, that are well attended.
“It is really a community center already, so it makes sense to bring all of these services together,” she said. -Following the presentation from the service providers, members of the public had an opportunity to ask questions about the project.
Jeff Shaffer raised concerns over the cost of maintaining the building if the service providers decide not to stay there after it’s built. The service providers would rent space in the building, with the rent money going into a fund to help cover the cost of maintaining the building. If they were to leave, Shaffer noted, that cost would then fall to the town.
“From the very beginning, this whole thing was pushed as never going to cost us a penny, and that’s very possibly not true at all,” he said. “And I don’t think the residents know that, that we’re on the hook for it. Plus if people pull out, we’re on the hook for paying for it. And you’re calling it a regional thing, so we’re going to be paying for Augusta County and Bath County also if it falls on us.”
Council member Steve Bickley replied that, since the Community Development Block Grant that the town is applying for does not require the town to put up any money in order to receive the funds, that there wouldn’t be any outstanding loans on the building except for the insurance policy and, “in the unlikely instance that everyone left,” the town could simply close the building, shut off the utilities and just pay the insurance policy on the empty building.
“Then why do it to begin with?” Shaffer asked.
“I’m trying to work in your scenario where you think everybody’s going to pack up and leave,” Bickley answered.
“I think that’s probably what’s going to happen,” Shaffer replied “I’m going to take the more optimistic approach where people stay in the facility,” Bickley said. “The people we’ve gone out and sought out for this, they’re all nonprofit folks. They’re not driven by the dollar to be here. They’re all funded by the public.”
Bickley also pointed out that the money from the grant the town is applying for would be going “to some community somewhere.”
“With these types of organizations willing to come to Goshen, why wouldn’t we accept that money and try to bring them here and try to bring those services to this town?” he said. “I think we deserve them as much as any other town does, so if they’re willing to come provide the services and people are willing to give us the money to put up a building, why would we turn it down?
“I understand your concerns about this being a burden on the town,” he added, “but I think that we’ve sought out the right kinds of organizations. We don’t have people who are driven by the dollar. We’ve sought out organizations that can be long-term partners.”
Schaff added that VPAS and the other organizations weren’t expecting “to live in that building for free.”
“We know that building has expenses,” she said. “We pay rent in other facilities and we pay our utilities.”
Jeff Shaffer’s wife Sandra asked if there was a minimum threshold of participation that the providers had to meet in order to stay in operation in a town like Goshen. Schaff said that there wasn’t, adding that, while she couldn’t promise anything, VPAS has “not ever pulled out of a community that was willing to support us.
“The only communities in my almost 19 years at VPAS that we have ever pulled out of were two communities where we were doing congregate meals programs and the people who were attending the programs refused – I mean absolutely refused – to participate in the programs that the federal government requires us to provide in order to get the funding,” she said. “They wanted a meal and they wanted to play Rook and that’s it and we couldn’t stay.”
Residents of Goshen and the surrounding area are already utilizing some of the services these providers offer in town. RARA’s mobile food pantry currently serves around 45 individuals from 20 households and last year, 57 households in Goshen applied for utility or housing assistance through RARA’s assistance programs; VPAS’s new café drew 19 people from Goshen and the surrounding areas on its first day and has had a steady turnout since; and, according to RAHC CEO Suzanne Sheridan, more than 170 people from Goshen, Millboro and Craigsville are currently patients at the health center.
Pérez also noted that these organizations were well-established within the area. RARA celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, and VPAS will hit that milestone in the near future. The library has been serving the town and the surrounding areas for decades while the health center began life as the Rockbridge Area Free Clinic more than 30 years ago and has been a Federally Qualified Health Center since 2014.
“I think we have stability, and I think with us we bring partners too, and when we do something we stick around,” Pérez said.
“These are booming programs,” Fargiano added “They’re exciting. We want to help people and we do a good job for people, and so there’s no failure in my mind.”
Goshen residents David and Lisa Conner praised the organizations for the services they provide to the town and advocated for the community center to allow them to expand the services they could offer.
“These people are doing a service and we need to support everything we can do to make Goshen a better place,” David said.
