News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
SOAR is growing up — and the decade-old organization has had its share of triumphs as well as growing pains.
Founded on a shoestring with help from Sisters Kiwanis, the Sisters Organization for Activities and Recreation now offers a wide range of programs from arts to athletics for Sisters children from pre-schoolers to high schoolers. SOAR hosts a full winter schedule of basketball tournaments and is adding sports like lacrosse (see related story, page 5).
Many Sisters families rely on SOAR for childcare and for constructive activities for older children such as Taekwondo, a Teen Center and outdoor expeditions.
“There’s probably close to 150 kids and families that come to the center every day to participate in programs,” said SOAR Executive Director Carrie Ward.
More participate on an occasional basis.
Getting all those programs launched — and also building a community center near Sisters High School — took a lot of work and a lot of money. And the money was readily available through grants.
Many agencies provide grants to organizations like SOAR for capital projects like a community center and for starting up new and innovative programs like the Teen Center. But once a program is up and running, there aren’t so many grants to keep things going.
That’s given SOAR a bad case of growing pains.
SOAR has an operating budget of about $600,000. Some $165,000 is funded through the existing tax base. The rest of the money comes from program fees (which need to be reasonable to encourage participation), donations and grants.
The organization is about $90,000 short of what it needs to sustain its current program and staff levels for this fiscal year (through June 30), according to Ward.
Last May, voters resoundingly defeated a ballot measure that would have provided SOAR with a 35 cents per $1,000 of assessed valuation local option tax to add to its existing 22 cents per $1,000 tax base.
According to Ward, that forces the organization to undertake a mix of fund-raising and cost-cutting to balance the budget.
“The first place we’ll try to make some cuts is just our expenses in supplies,” Ward said.
Next come cuts to programs that aren’t paying their own way through user fees. That’s a little trickier than it sounds because, due to cash from grants over the years, the organization has not developed good measurements for assessing the financial viability of individual programs.
Ward said she can’t identify programs that might be cut until the SOAR board of directors and the SOAR foundation board analyze the situation in January. She also noted that most programs can be made to be self-sustaining in terms of direct costs. However, charging enough to cover overhead costs would likely push fees too high and discourage participation.
“The third tier, which I really hope we don’t get to, is cutting employee costs,” Ward said. “That definitely means cutting programs, because if we don’t have our staff, we don’t have programs.”
She noted that staff has already been told there will be no salary increases this year.
SOAR is working on fund-raising activities — seeking local grants, approaching major donors, planning a fund-raising event — to make up the $90,000 shortfall.
But Ward said that SOAR now needs to develop strategies to sustain itself over the long-term.
“It’ll probably take a real shift in how we operate the organization,” Ward said.
That means, in part, developing budget strategies to more accurately determine the actual cost of each individual program and what it will take to fund them. And it means finding more money.
The director doubts that SOAR will again ask voters for tax dollars, at least for the next couple of years. That means SOAR will need to dedicate substantial staff time and energy to creating a sustainable, long-term fund-raising program.
Then, Ward says, the question becomes how much fund-raising an oft-tapped community is capable of sustaining.
Ward acknowledges that SOAR’s challenges are tough, but she does not paint a bleak picture.
“The organization is really strong,” she said. “We have a beautiful community center that the community built and it’s a busy place.”
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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