Philanthropy Today
Philanthropy Today
The Manhattan Emergency Shelter on the GMCF Community Hour Show Episode - 202
Emily Wagner, Executive Director of Manhattan Emergency Shelter, discusses their fundraising initiatives and the challenges of securing consistent funding for homeless services in Kansas.
• Manhattan Emergency Shelter collaborated with the Center of Hope Ministries to provide a warming shelter during the difficult winter
• The 21st Annual Bids for Bags Benefit takes place May 2nd at St. Thomas More Church with Derby chic attire
• Event features silent auction of 100-125 new designer bags, live auction of premium bags, and a section for 150+ used designer bags
• Kansas provides no state funding for homeless shelters, creating dependency on unstable federal grants
• MESI works closely with the Crisis Center, referring clients between services as needed
• Grow Green Match Day funds have become crucial for maintaining operations amid funding uncertainty
• Tickets still available for Bids for Bags at mesikansas.org
Visit mesikansas.org to purchase tickets or make a donation to support Manhattan's homeless shelter services.
Philanthropy Today is brought to you by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation. In this episode we feature a recently broadcast segment of the GMCF Community Hour, as heard on NewsRadio KMAN. We are back on the GMCF Community Hour here on NewsRadio KMAN. I'm Dave Lewis. Our guest is Emily Wagner. Emily is the Executive Director of the Manhattan Emergency Center, MESI. M-e-s-i is also how it is known by some, and we're going to learn more about some of the things that are happening, and it's a new world these days. I'm going to have you pull that mic a little bit closer, it is a new world.
Speaker 1:Sure yeah. So how are things?
Speaker 2:Things are good.
Speaker 1:Good Haptic busy yeah.
Speaker 2:The spring is our fundraising time and our grant season, so it makes for busy time. Gosh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know and and you know one of the things and we can I think we can talk a little bit briefly about this, because it was such a difficult winter in a lot of ways, you know, and we had the warming shelter and I know you collaborated with uh, with um, center of hope, center for ministries, in order to make that. We had a nice recognition for them at the uh, at the CFAs here a couple of weeks ago and uh, congratulations on being a part of that effort to make sure that that, uh, many of our homeless residents had a place where they could yeah, could, could find safety.
Speaker 2:Well, and I honestly I have to give credit to Will Parrish for starting that and spearheading that. And then I know Jeremy Harmon's really taken some reins of that and been working to find maybe a more permanent place and do a lot of fundraising. It's a lot of work. Running a shelter mass shelter is not easy. It's hard to find volunteers and people that want to do it, and so I was super proud of them and just the community for coming out and helping, because even though we have a homeless shelter in town, we will always need a warming shelter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's a wonderful thing to be able to talk about. Yeah, makes the community proud when we do those types of things to help others out. Well, you have an event coming up here in a couple weeks.
Speaker 2:I do, I do. So. We have our 21st Annual Bids for Bags Benefit, formerly known as Bag Lady Auction, so hopefully I won't say that and mess up with the name of it. But yeah, it is May 2nd. I'm going to start at 530. That's at St Thomas More Church again. They're always so gracious to let us use their utopia room Derby chic attire. It'll be lots of fun. We're still collecting bags. Still have a few tables left. I think maybe we've got five tables left before we're sold out. So doing well, fundraisers are important for us.
Speaker 1:When you say you're collecting bags. What is involved in that?
Speaker 2:So we collect bags, we ask for people to donate new designer handbags and then we sometimes pair them with gift cards or other things that we have donated experiences, hotel stays, you know things like that and then we auction them. We have a silent auction usually around 100 to 125 bags in the silent auction, and then we have a live piece of it where we have maybe 10 to 15 more bags where we do a fun live auction, and then there is a I say a small piece of the of the event is our used bag section, but actually it has grown to be a large piece. We've got I think they told me over 150 used designer bags this year. So that's always fun and I think it's a good addition to the event because if you don't get one of the new bags on on the auction then you can always go and find something pretty neat on the used bag auction.
Speaker 1:Where do all these bags come from?
Speaker 2:Donors in the community businesses. We have lots of sponsors that sponsor the event and you know we've done this for 21 years, so we have just a good following of donors that have been with us through the years. I'm sure we have several that have been coming to the event almost every year. So they are they're loyal to us. I know they start shopping for bags as soon as one events over. They're ready to find a bag for the next year. So, but it's also a good way for businesses, I think, just to get their name out there. Um, we have a lot of real estate agents and bankers and um insurance companies and I I think it's just a great way to kind of put your swag out there and let people know that you're charitable, you're in the community um and and are willing to donate and support causes here.
Speaker 1:What's that process like if someone wants to make a donation?
Speaker 2:To donate. Just contact us. We'll take your donation any way you can get it to us. We will also take money and we can go purchase a bag and put your name on it as a donation. But we have a website. Right now you can go to our website, which is wwwmesaiorg. There's a button on there where you can go to our event website. It's an Octrea website and you can purchase tickets. You can input all of your attendees on there. You can pay through that and then you can also contact us for your bag donations. If you want, we can come and pick them up. You can donate them and drop them off at any point. We're just we're lucky in this community that we have such an outpouring of support.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you have the Utopia Room up at St Thomas More, which isa pretty big size facility. It's, you know, a gymnasium size and you can get probably a couple hundred, 300 people in there to sit down and enjoy the night's events. And what is your typical attendance?
Speaker 2:We usually are about 300. Are you? Yeah, we're close to that, between 250 and 300, of course depends on how many volunteers and people that we have coming to help with the event, but I think we'll be around 300 this year. We usually have 30, 32 tables. A lot of the event center is taken up by our used bags and our live bags, so it takes a lot of the event center is taken up by our used bags and our life bags, so it takes a lot of tables and a lot of space to put those all out and we try not to cram ourselves in there. We want to have fun. We want everyone up and moving and mingling and chatting and eating and bidding. Oh, there's food.
Speaker 2:There is food. There is food. We have heavy hors d'oeuvres. We have two open bars and it's fun. It gets people up moving, looking at the bid sheets, kind of feeling the purses and deciding what they want. Sometimes you ever see the attendees trying them on, walking around in them a little bit just to see if it's one they want. So it's always a fun event. I love to see the bags kind of create some excitement and we get some bidding wars.
Speaker 1:I guess I've never really thought about trying on a bag.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, you should come and just see the event.
Speaker 1:So it's not just for ladies. No, no, we do have some men, we've had some men the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:we have more men coming.
Speaker 1:Do you have some man bags? We do Some mercies. Yes, is that what you call?
Speaker 2:them. Yes, we do have a. We have a table full of traditional kind of man bags and bourbon and whiskey and those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go, we do have a few of those. What about like backpacks? Is that part of that?
Speaker 2:We have backpacks, we have diaper bags, we have golf bags, really anything. And you know, we we have some creative things. We have some floral baskets that get donated from some of the nurseries around here. So anything you can, you can kind of make into a package or a basket or a bag. We we have it.
Speaker 1:And fundraising obviously is the key aspect about this, because that's you know and you know and we we talked. I talked with Lori and Liz a little bit about this. You know from Big know and we talked. I talked with Lori and Liz a little bit about this. You know from Big Lakes there's a lot of uncertainty with funding. You know from many of your government resources these days, and that is something that I know a lot of people are very concerned about. You know what the future of their support is going to be like. How does that play in with the Manhattan Emergencies? Helter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a bit uncertain times right now. The fun thing that we get to do is we still have to apply for the funding. We're being told, though the funding is not there right now, but we still need to have our applications in by the deadline. So that's what I've been working on these last couple months and getting those in. That's difficult, knowing that the funds may not be there, and you go through a lot of work to turn these applications in, but we're hopeful.
Speaker 2:You got to have a little bit of faith that things will work out. You know, one thing I really am kind of hoping is people don't realize that the state of Kansas does not provide funding for homeless shelters. There is no funding through the state of Kansas for homeless shelters. They will fund domestic violence shelters if you are a licensed and accredited DV shelter, but we do not qualify for that because we're a homeless shelter. And so you know, with some of the changes in the federal government and some of the funding there possibly going away, I'm hoping that that will just get Kansas to look again at providing some funding for shelters, because there will always be a need.
Speaker 1:That does differentiate you from the crisis center.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, yeah, they. You know we work closely with each other. I want to say, sometimes on a weekly basis, when clients are sometimes no longer in basis, um, when, when clients are sometimes no longer in danger, they may come to us and vice versa. We, we refer clients to them often when we find they're in a in a dangerous situation and so um, but we are different entities and we do um, we do have different funding streams.
Speaker 1:Yeah, speaking of funding, we just got a couple of minutes left here. Grow Green, match Day is a big day for you.
Speaker 2:So, with all this going on with federal funding, that is why this year Grow Green Match is going to be huge for us, just to give us, hopefully, that cushion. I'm really trying to grow our endowments and our reserves in case we are without funding for several months. But I'm excited for Grow Green Match this year. See what it can do for all the agencies in town, not just us. There's so many agencies that really depend on Grow Green Match.
Speaker 1:Do you have a specific use for those donations?
Speaker 2:So in the past we were putting them all in our endowment and we were fortunate that we weren't having to pull those out. The last couple years we have used those for in our general fund just to supplement costs. So I'm not sure this year what we'll end up doing with it. It'll kind of depend on, maybe, how much we raise and what I find out.
Speaker 1:Having funds available to you is important and you know at that point you may later need to reevaluate what you need to best apply, I may need to pull those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's why it's so important. The Grow Green Match funds, the contributions and fundraising, those are all undesignated funds that I can use to plug the holes. Yeah, and so you know, I'm hoping that this year is. Although so much uncertainty right now, I'm hoping that by the end of the year things will kind of shake out well for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah and for everybody, yeah and for everybody. The details again on bids for bags.
Speaker 2:Yeah, February 2nd 530.
Speaker 1:No, not February Not.
Speaker 2:February, may, 2nd May 2nd. We're past February, May 2nd, 530, the Utopia Room at St Thomas More. Utopia Room at St Thomas Moore. Usually the event's over by about 8.30. People are ready to purchase, pay for their bags and get on home.
Speaker 1:And tickets are still available.
Speaker 2:Tickets are still available. We have maybe five tables or so left. Get on our website and you can purchase your tickets online.
Speaker 1:Emily Wagner, always great to have you in.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Appreciate all the work that you and your crew do and looking forward to doing what we can to impact your best efforts on Grow Green Match Day and everything else Great. Thank you for having me From the Manhattan Emergency Center. Mesicansasorg is the website. Vern's going to be stepping back in the studio here in just a couple of minutes for some community updates and more on the GMCF Community Hour here on NewsRadio KMAN.