For 90 years, the Emergency Family Assistance Association has tossed lifelines to people who have needed a little extra food to get through the week, a bit of help with the rent or a medical bill, or a place to keep the kids warm and safe.
It has done this with an open heart, a flinty eye toward the bottom line and a mostly no-questions- asked attitude.
No state or federal funds are in the operating budget, so the agency can help anyone in Boulder or Broomfield counties who asks. The agency is seeking funding from this year’s Post-News Season to Share campaign.
“There are not many barriers to entry,” executive director Terry Benjamin says. “It is one of the blessings of an organization like EFAA. We can be highly flexible and deal with people on a case-by-case basis.”
EFAA operates a bit like the emergency room of the social services system, Benjamin says, helping in a pinch or in a crisis. Families that show up and need more help than a trip through the food bank are assigned a caseworker, who helps them to develop strategies for pulling out of the cycle of neediness.
“We can’t help them with rent month after month, but we can help stitch together a package and make sure they at least have a fighting chance,” Benjamin says.
Sometimes that fighting chance is in the form of emergency housing, or transitional housing, where families can live for up to two years.
These days needy families are served primarily from the recently completed Heyman Family Client Services Center, near the Holiday neighborhood in north Boulder.
The new headquarters includes better dry and cold storage for the food bank, client consultation rooms and, finally, a place large enough for 20 staff members to meet and for hundreds of volunteers to do their work comfortably.
The building cost $4 million, paid for through an aggressive capital campaign. “There was no risk of money being pulled out of services,” Benjamin says of the building, which was GreenBuilt and includes a solar electric-generation system that keeps the lights on and the water heated for cheap.
The icing on the cake is seven units of family housing in the building and another three units around the corner. These apartments have helped ease some of the growing demand for transitional shelter.
All last fall, families on the verge of homelessness — they might be bunking with friends or family, but be on the verge of losing even that shelter — began to stack up on waiting lists.
EFAA has banked about $585,000 from Boulder County’s Worthy Cause tax to acquire more units of transitional housing in Lafayette.
“EFAA is an important part of the fabric of this community, and we have earned a reputation of really being smart with what we do with people’s donations,” Benjamin says.
Dana Coffield: 303-954-1954
