Home run | A York County organization serves the homeless while cutting energy costs
The nonprofit sector sadly mirrors our larger society in its marked divisions that too often fall along economic and racial lines. With this fragmentation, it is far too easy to forget that true community sustainability and the environmental and “green” movements must include the most disenfranchised members of Maine who are often most impacted by pollution, lack of access to beautiful places and healthy food, the rising cost of energy and affordable housing.
Don Gean, the executive director of the York County Shelter Programs, never forgets what he calls the “chronic apathy” that allows homelessness. “I stay mad all the time,” says Gean, who has run the organization, which provides meals, housing, and medical, dental and legal services to homeless residents of Maine’s southernmost county, for the past 24 years.
Gean and the York County Shelter Programs’ impressive effort to reduce energy consumption by 30% has been fueled not only by a desire for cost savings, but an abiding and righteous anger about poverty in Maine, and an undying commitment to fairness on behalf of the homeless people Gean and his staff serve. The $3 million York County Shelter Programs organization offers extensive services, including an emergency shelter serving 600 people a year; a 24-hour food pantry serving 40 families a day; two soup kitchens and a bakery; subsidized housing at a variety of locations throughout the county; and a farm, complete with two hogs, two cows, 130 free-range chickens and a wood lot.
Going green
York County Shelter Programs uses 29 buildings around the county to serve homeless residents. According to Gean, before he and his staff began tackling the issue of energy consumption, those buildings consumed 33,000 gallons of heating oil a year. “The highest costs of running this business are, in this order: staff, energy and health care,” says Gean, who has 44 full-time employees and 500 volunteers. “We couldn’t do anything about staff or health care costs, so we decided to set a goal for reducing energy costs by 10%. We failed, and saved 30%.”
Gean and staff began working on their goal by tackling “low-hanging fruit” first; that is, insulating attics and weatherizing windows and doors. “We saved $9,000 there,” says Gean. “These things work.”
Staff then focused on the Dumpsters the organization spent $14,000 to rent annually. They decided to cut the Dumpster expense in half and put the saved dollars into employee health plans. To accomplish their goal, they established a composting system for food scraps, which are collected from various facilities and transported to the 105-acre farm, which serves as home to six men. The organization also saves money through the efforts of bands of volunteers, who have collected $1 million worth of donated food from their local grocery stores.
Focus on the future
York County Shelter Programs’ greenest venture yet is a newly constructed, 4,000-square-foot, energy-efficient, eight-unit residence that includes computerized heating, solar panels that provide electricity and hot water, a wood fire burner and a half-acre of gardens. The organization spends $2,000 a year on the wood to heat the facility, which is harvested from a wood lot on the farm owned and managed by the organization.
To create additional cost savings, residents split and stack the fire wood. “It’s good, honest work,” says Pat Coon, co-owner of ReVision Energy in Portland, which installed the boiler. It was important to the organization that residents play a role in keeping themselves warm, he says. “Part of it was they wanted to instill in the people who use the facility a sense of responsibility.” The unit runs on about five cords of wood a year — as efficient as an oil burner — which speaks to the design of both the boiler and the building, he says.
In another residential facility, a home for four women, York County Shelter Programs has installed solar panels and replaced clothes dryers with clotheslines — both inside and out.
Gean and his staff are just getting going. They have plans to tear down four two-unit apartments, and to construct another green building with a “green roof” garden. The building will not have carpeting, but will have ceramic tile and radiant heat. “There is enough money in the system to provide quality care for people,” says Gean.
Elizabeth Banwell is director of external affairs for the Maine Association of Nonprofits in Portland. She can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
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