Last night I went to Cocoon House in Everett and met with Marty Arellano, the director of youth operations there. Cocoon House is a non-profit organization that provides care – particularly housing – to homeless persons under age 18. I had met Marty a few months ago when the PI (Janet Walthew) for the study I am doing introduced me to her at a community forum to discuss increasing county funding for drug court programs. I became more interested in meeting her lately, because I needed to learn more about non-profit management and funding.
We spent over an hour together as she showed me around their main complex and took me to her office to chat and let me ask questions. I was interested in the management of the organization. Her division – youth operations – executes the primary mission of cocoon house – serving youth. Other divisions include administration and development (which includes research and fund-raising). Their primary complex is a converted motel with rooms for 16 kids. They have 6 full-time case managers who work in shifts so that always there are case managers on site. They keep two full-time masters-level counselors, have a cook who is also their gardener, and they have an Americorps worker who arranges for other volunteers to provide for them.
Each kid works one-on-one with a case manager to set some personal goals, with two goals being to get education (usually at Everett High School) and get a job. There are four rules for the complex – curfew, no fighting, no drugs, and no sex. The kids divide maintenance duties so that they learn self-care. When they turn 18 then they have to leave unless they are finishing high school, but in any case Cocoon House has transitional housing elsewhere for kids 18-21. Ideally, the counselors will be able to meet with the kids’ parents or family and work out an arrangement for the child to return home, and usually this can happen, but the door stay open for kids who want to leave at any time and who want to return at any time.
They have four full-time outreach workers in different districts who recruit kids to come use services. Besides the Cocoon House complex, they also have drop-in centers and temporary shelters for youth who do not need permanent housing.
Marty told me that they get funding from about 25 different agencies, accounting for 75% of their funding. These agencies include mostly government sources, but non-profit and commercial entities also contribute. In all cases, agencies require huge data output about where funding goes, and with their relatively small Cocoon House organization getting funding from so many organizations with so many different reporting requirements, the net result is that they collect a broad range of survey data about many aspects of operation. The remainder of their funding comes through fund-raising efforts from private sources.
I started asking her questions about how she collects this data, because I am so fond of survey information. She told me that the county licenses data input software and gets assigned a set of questions to answer. Marty used to work in some county agency – I remarked that I thought it was unusual for someone to have a career change from supervising fund distribution to non-profits to directing a specific non-profit, and she said that it was unusual. She worked her way up the government hierarchy to be at the highest level of her interest, and I think it is very fortunate for Cocoon House to have such an insider working for them. I felt tickled to meet her myself, because I know how often that unqualified persons with spunk and a dream found non-profits and then set precedent for a legacy of incompetence in management. Surely Marty could make a lot more money elsewhere, but how fortunate for the kids that she took interest in being at Cocoon House.
Anyway, Marty is a major resource for county connections. She told me there was a demographer I should meet – I love it when people tell me they know a demographer I should meet – and she gave me his name as Bo Tunestam, office phone to the general secretary is 425.388.7200. She also told me to read this book called Street Dependent Youth by Jerry Fest, a social worker in Oregon. She said that I could talk about fundraising with their Americorps worker, Danielle Gadek at 425.259.5802×109. Finally she said that Oklahoma University sets a lot of the standards they have to meet, and that I should check out their Runaway and Homeless Youth website or write them about training at rhytraining@ou.edu.