VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Jay Height:
Hi welcome. And this week we want to give you an update on the difference you’ve made in the families here at Shepherd community. Back in March, when we put together our 120 day plan, we said we were going to impact five areas. Now I want to give you a report on how those five areas were impacted and the difference you made in the lives of our families. So let’s look at the first one, which is family support. We helped over 304 families for a total of $326, 554. So 326,554.

Jay Height:
These are the families that were touched. This was held primarily us paying utilities, rent, and then basic household items that they might need. This is why our concern is that this need may grow again now that the moratorium on evictions, the moratorium on utility shutoffs and the loss of unemployment benefits is a huge press. You can see, we spent a lot of money to help stabilize our families.

Jay Height:
The second area was around connections. We wanted to deal with all of the problems of social isolation and we not even sure how many we helped. This is done. We spent over $7,000 doing weekly videos, sending them out to our community, encouragement, both in English and Spanish, wanting to help our families know that someone cared, lots of volunteers calling in. So that was our connections to deal with that isolation. The third is food and we served over 89,846 meals and spent over $100,265. That’s both in prepared meals. That’s also groceries that we would deliver and to people’s homes, as well as many families coming in, we are still doing each of these areas in different ways. And food continues to be a challenge for our neighbors, and we’re going to continue to help them. Helping with the medical side of things, delivering medical supplies, helping our families get their medicines. We helped over 605 families with a total of $16,762.

Jay Height:
And finally the area that has taken so much of our focus and each of these are critically important. And this is one, learning. We spent over $47,000 helping over 380 students. We were buying devices, Chromebooks, iPads, and getting them into the kids’ homes, paying for connectivity. And so all of this report takes us through the end of July, but we started our new road to recovery, where we’re helping families get jobs. And we’ll be talking in the weeks to come more how we’re doing that, continuing to stay connected to those who are dealing with social isolation, continuing to meet the food needs in talking with the great leader, John Elliott at Gleaners. They’re a great partner for our community. They believe it’s going to take a couple of years for us to continue to reach out to our community, to deal with the issue of hunger, continuing to work on the medical needs of our neighbors, getting devices into their homes, and helping with learning.

Jay Height:
And we’re really excited to announce that we’ve opened three e-learning pods and trying to help those students who are stuck at home, can’t go to school because they’ve gone to e-learning, but giving them a safe place to go and support. We’re continuing to help. We’ll be spending over $30,000 to make sure all of our kids, all of the families that we’re serving are connected in a great partnership with Charter. You’ll be hearing more ways we need to continue to have your support, whether it’s with the e-learning pods and with a new project of trying to build a new storage freezer and cooler it’ll cost us about $60,000 so that we can take more fresh food in and more frozen meats and such so that we can continue to meet the needs. Together, we’ll make it a difference. We’re on the road to recovery together. Won’t you help?