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RARA, VPAS, RAHC Would Expand Services
Citizens of Goshen gathered in town hall last Thursday night to hear from several Rockbridge area service providers about the services they will offer at the proposed Goshen Community Center and to ask questions about the project. The public hearing was the second of two required meetings as part of the application process for a grant to construct the facility.
“We’ve got a lot of excellent service providers … who have been actively trying to bring a lot of those services to Goshen on a mobile basis,” said Jeremy Crute, regional planner for the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission. “But having a community facility would allow them to provide those services more consistently and more efficiently in order to ensure that people in town aren’t having to drive half-an-hour-plus to go to the doctor or the dentist or get healthy food or what have you.”
Lindsey Pérez, director of Rockbridge Area Relief Association (RARA), Melissa Sayre with Valley Program For Aging Services (VPAS) and Dr. Stuart Fargiano the director of dental services at Rockbridge Area Health Center (RAHC) all spoke about the services they are currently providing to Goshen and the surrounding areas and how they hope to expand the services in the proposed community center. RAHC has mobile health and dental clinics that come to Goshen at least once a month and tend to draw people, not just from Goshen but from Millboro and Craigsville as well.
“This is probably our best mobile unit area,” Fargiano said. “We do Natural Bridge, we do Rockbridge Baths, we’ll be in Glasgow, but Goshen just seems to really be our busiest one.”
VPAS currently offers two services to Goshen – a café that meets once a week at the Goshen firehouse and provides a meal, activity and socialization opportunities for seniors, and the Meals on Wheels program. With the new facility, Sayre said, VPAS hopes to offer on-site insurance counseling and caregiver assistance on a regular basis for the senior citizens of Goshen and the surrounding communities.
RARA works with Washington and Lee University’s Campus Kitchen to bring a mobile food pantry to town once a month, but Pérez acknowledged that the mobile food pantry doesn’t always work for everyone’s schedule and can offer limited food options compared to a food pantry with a fixed location.
“You can’t provide as much food with that and it obviously doesn’t work with everyone’s schedule,” she said. “We know that the food insecurity rates in Goshen are double what Rockbridge County is in general, so we know there are people that need food here, and it’s hard to either come to that one day of the month or drive all the way to Lexington or somewhere else. Our plan is to bring [the food pantry] where the need is, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
To that end, Pérez said, RARA will run a food pantry out of the house that currently sits on the property until the new facility has been built. The house, which will also serve as the town offices beginning in July, was the site of the town’s original school building. The new facility will be built as an addition to the house, instead of as a separate, stand-alone structure as was originally proposed. The mobile health and dental clinics will also move their operation from the old school building to the new town office, which will have an electrical hook-up for the mobile clinics so they don’t have to run a generator.
Goshen Vice Mayor Steve Bickley added that the Rockbridge Area YMCA has committed to offering programs in the facility, including programs for seniors and after-school programs, and Blue Ridge Legal Services has also expressed interest in utilizing space in the facility.
During the public comments portion of the hearing, Jeff Shaffer noted that he’d asked Craigsville Mayor Richard Fox about the expenses on Craigsville’s town building, which is similar in size to the proposed community center. Shaffer said that Fox told him the expenses for the building, including the insurance on it, totaled around $100,000 per year. He asked if the town was prepared to pay a comparable amount for this facility.
“I haven’t heard anybody talking any numbers at all, and we’ve been talking about this for two years,” he said.
Bickley explained that, should the town be awarded the grant to construct the building, there would be “about a six-month period” during which the town would work with the engineers and architects and “go through the contracts with the service providers” to determine what the rent for the providers will be, as well as the income from the building and the expenses associated with it.
“Just because we’re awarded the grant doesn’t mean we’re sticking a shovel in the ground,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot to do during that six-month period to figure out if this is a viable project.”
Lisa Conner praised Fargiano, Pérez and Sayre for the services their organizations currently provide the town and expressed enthusiasm for the expansion of services offered at the new facility.
“The things you guys are bringing are phenomenal,” she said. “Thank you.”
