Feaker on delayed plea: 'I don't want to cry wolf'

Residents opened up their hearts and their pocketbooks after the Topeka Rescue Mission made a public plea for contributions Aug. 5, having donated more than $400,000 as of this past week.

But that request also triggered questions about whether the mission's various programs have grown to the point where it has bitten off more than it can chew, and why it waited until its shortfall rose to more than $1 million — at a rate of $180,000 a month — before it sought help from the public.

Barry Feaker has been executive director since 1986 of the mission, which is overseen by an eight-member board of directors and incurred expenses last year totaling nearly $5.28 million. He addressed some of those questions last week in a meeting with The Topeka Capital-Journal.

Question: How did we get to the point of being $1 million in the hole before asking the public for help?

Answer: The Topeka Rescue Mission for many years has been able to do what it does without a lot of fanfare. Since the last time we made a public plea to the community, which was 33 years ago, we have built a donor base that's pretty substantial. We've built all the way from a $70,000-a-year budget in 1986 to a budget of more than $5 million a year today.

One of the reasons this came as a shock to everybody is because we don't have any big public annual campaigns. The majority of our folks who support us are individual mom and pops. We'll have some of those large gifts that come in for capital campaigns, but it's been 33 years since we last made a public appeal that we might close the doors. What we've been doing has worked.

This year, it didn't. The dollars didn't come in, starting in January.

Because the average donor to the Topeka Rescue Mission is giving about $65 a year, we need to be very careful about going to them saying, "The sky is falling."

So we started this year having an average loss of about $180,000 a month in regards to expenditures. Let's round it up to $200,000. So four months ago, the shortfall was up to $800,000. The average donor to the rescue mission doesn't see that as a crisis.

Whenever we've been in that situation before, we haven't told people we were close to closing. We've never had to. Last year we had a $600,000 infusion of one gift that allowed us to stabilize when we were seeing some difficult times. We've seen that happen for decades.

This time it didn't happen.

So this (the public plea for donations) comes as a shock to a lot of people, because that's not what we do.

Other organizations — I'm not saying all of them — but other organizations are hitting that bell a lot. We decided if we ever hit that bell, it had better be serious.

So how did we make it this far? We had reserves. We tried to build those reserves up for that rainy day. But it not only rained, it poured.

Q: So you're saying that last year would have been a problem except for a $600,000 donation?

A: No. There would have been more of a problem if it wasn't for that. We were starting to see a slide financially compared to what we had seen before. There were other gifts in, but that was just one example.

But at the end of the year, we ended up good. December giving was good. So coming into 2019 it looked like if things stayed the course, we would not be where we are.

But January, February just kept chopping down to where the income was not there. So we waited to see if the big gift would come in. I talked to some of our bigger donors who had historically made some big donations before and they said they weren't capable.

The question was, "When do we do the clarion call to the community?" The board and I were debating this. And I said, "Let's wait. I don't want to cry wolf." If we turn around and we do the clarion call and the day after that we get a $600,000 infusion or a $1 million infusion, which has happened before, then our credibility is challenged.

Q: If no additional money comes in, you're closing your doors Sept. 30, right?

A: Correct, if no additional money came in and we don't slow down expenditures.

But we've already terminated one retail operation, our thrift store. On or before Oct. 1, we will be shutting down what we call the Boutique on the Boulevard.

We wouldn't just put the blinders on and go all the way to the end of the road. If we did that, we'd run out of money. But we would look at other things that we would cut.

We do a significant amount of food baskets every month, every week actually, in addition to the shelters. We distribute other kinds of goods, clothes, different supplies, educational programs. We do street operations that work with volunteers. We have a volunteer department. Beyond that, we don't have a lot of fluff.

And those things are not fluff. Without them, we're pretty much down to being a place people would sleep. There would be no trauma interventions, despite the complexities of the people that we work with. We would essentially keep the shelter open like a motel and hope nobody hurts anybody during the middle of the night. Which is not practical because of the level of difficulties that people who come into the mission are going through.

The best way I can describe it is that in some ways we're a mini-state hospital. We're a place of refuge for people that are escaping domestic violence, human trafficking. We are a location for people who are about at the end of their rope as far as having any hope whatsoever, so we're a place of suicide prevention. We are a place where people coming straight out of correctional facilities come, because they have nowhere else to go.

And so it's not a place that you would really want to have open unless you have trained, equipped people to provide intervention. And it's not just our staff doing that. We help facilitate connections with Valeo. They're with us about five days a week. We have medical needs. We have a couple of docs that volunteer. We have a team of nurses that volunteer with us.

You've got to facilitate all that to be able to really help the people, because you can't just open the door and say, "It's good."

Q: Why does it cost so much in salaries to operate the mission?

A: We've posted that information on our website. We employ 98 people.

[Editor's note: That site says the mission has 98 staff members whose current total salary, not including Feaker's, is $2,414,000, amounting to an average of $24,887. Feaker's salary and benefits for 2018 totaled $96,057, according to the mission's income tax return, which hasn't yet been audited. Feaker said that this year he took a voluntary annual $10,000 cut in pay).

Q: And those 98 people do what?

A: For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we have from 230 to 300-plus very challenged people staying with us every night. You have to have personnel up 24/7, so that's why it takes so many people.

We have basically four divisions. The homeless services division does our shelter work, food services and street operations.

Then we have the educational services division, which offers everything from a 12-week job readiness program all the way to a two-year training program, and everything in between. Under the education division, we also have parked facilities management.

Then we have a supportive services division. That is our volunteer department. That does all the work to receive and distribute the food. We work with volunteers on all that, and there's some staff, too. You've got to handle that correctly.

Also under supportive services is the communications area, which we do a newsletter and recently started a podcast. We also have the financial department, which works with a couple people in the business office and works with auditors and a reconciliation group that comes in.

Then we have what we call the trauma-based initiatives department. And under that is the Children's Palace. The Children's Palace is a recent development so that we can work with the kids of parents who stay at the mission to help stabilize them when they leave. That is our most expensive area, in and of itself, for the number of people we work with.

We also have a community stabilization division, which now focuses solely on combating human trafficking through what we call "Restore Hope." In 2014, we had four referrals to us for human trafficking. That rose to, I think, 45 in 2015, 82 in 2016, 131 in 2017 and more than 200 last year. There's a small staff that's on that, primarily volunteers.

Q: Do you have any reserves?

A: We're spending down all of those to get us through the month of August.

Q: So your safety net's gone in two weeks?

A: It's the same safety net we've had for the past 66 years. So we have a track record here.

Q: But you had enough in reserves to get through your shortfall this year to date.

A: Yes, we have to build it back up. We had a safety net, but we've used it. The thing is that we have built up reserves, and spent a lot of them to do the things that we're doing. We've got to build them back up, in case the giving is not healthy like it has been in the past.

Part of the reason for this, I'm pretty confident, is that people weren't aware of the impact we're having. We've brought a lot of attention to things like human trafficking and neighborhood issues, but I have not done a good job lately of bringing the homelessness concerns to the forefront like we have historically.

But since we brought it back last week, Topeka's really showing what it is. We got a $100,000 gift from a former Topekan and his wife, but the rest is coming in in small gifts from things like bake sales and lemonade stands.

Q: This community responds well, but there's basically a $5 million bogey you're trying to get to on an annual basis. How do you sustain that in the long term?

A: We don't have a product. What we have is an opportunity to invest in people. We have to keep the viability of our product strong enough that people want to buy it. We have to do it in regards to helping people understand how they can take the value that they have and ingraft it into somebody else who is asking the question, "Do I have any value at all?"

Q: If you strip out all the things that might be considered non-core missions and go back to only doing your core mission, how much would you need annually?

A: I don't have a quick answer for you, but I think it's probably going to be between $3 million and $3.5 million. That's just off the top of my head. Probably 70 percent of our budget is core.

And I'll say this. I get the core. It's kind of like if we're having steak and you've got potatoes and green beans, the core is the steak for some people and the potatoes for somebody else and the green beans for somebody else.

In my mind, everything we're doing is core.

The human trafficking victim who comes into the rescue mission is homeless, right? So we can treat them like the homeless person over here and serve them the same way, but we're not going to help them because of the traumatization that has occurred because of the sexual assaults. That's reshaped their brain, their biochemistry, the whole 10 yards. And really, as a community, as a state, as a nation, we're just now getting a handle on what that looks like.

So we can say: "Well, I'm sorry you're homeless. I'm sorry you're going through all the trauma. I'm sorry that the smells trigger you or the sounds trigger you, and you don't talk in linear and that you're afraid everybody's going to rape you in the middle of the night." We can say "Sorry, maybe this isn't the best place for you. Go out on the street. Good luck."

Or we can try to help that person more definitively, because that's part of our core.

It's the same thing we used to do with the alcoholic that came in. We can say, "Well, I'm sorry but you can't come in here, because you're an alcoholic." Or "Let's get you sober enough to get in here so you don't hurt somebody, and let's address your alcoholism, or your methamphetamines or your heroin or opiates or whatever your problem is. Or today, what about the 90-year-old guy who's coming in to us who needs his diaper changed? I mean, it's all the core.

The question is, "As a community, do we or don't we do as much as possible to meet these needs?" And that's where I've grown up in this to say, "I'm in a boat. Who do I throw overboard? Do I throw the traumatized kid overboard?"

And I'm sorry, I'm starting to get passionate here. By the way, I like your questions. I like this kind of dialogue, because it either changes me or reinforces me.

But I think the community will step up to the plate on those things. For the last many years, we have seen a progressive heart — kind of up and down, some good years and some not-so-great years — but we have seen the heart and the ability to be able to do what we do today.

So here's the question: What's the cost if we don't have a heart? What do we want this community to be?

You may or may not know this. To my surprise, last year the Topeka Rescue Mission was recognized from among 300 rescue ministries in North America as being the best example in North America of what a rescue mission should be. It's called the Citygate Award. I went to Milwaukee to receive it. They said "You guys are the examples of what we think rescue missions ought to be doing."

Why did that happen? I just got a call right before I came in there from the Citygate headquarters. They said "Can you guys come and train on human trafficking and what you're doing to network in the community to our next district meeting?"

I can't go this year because of this (the rescue mission's financial crisis). But when you look at Des Moines, you look at the Orange County Rescue Mission, and they're asking us to help them address human trafficking there. They're saying 'You guys have figured things out. We haven't."

So that's not Topeka Rescue Mission. We just happen to be on the front row of this. This is a community that has over many years said "yes."

We've got the new thing with the kids at school [Impact Avenues, a newly announced program aimed at finding stable places to live for an estimated 750 to 1,000 homeless students in this community]. We want to address this, to do what Wyandotte County did, with Impact Avenues. We decided not to be the driver on that but we're going to be with them hand in glove to hopefully eliminate homelessness among kids who are in school. If we can do that really well, maybe we can do the same kind of system with the general population.

This is messy. This is really messy because of the mess that exists within people's lives that they didn't necessarily create. The trauma that has occurred from generation to generation and the way that it has reshaped people's thinking, the way that they respond to their environments.

So you're right. What happens if we don't have the resources? Well, as I said to my board, if it doesn't come in, we don't do it. We just don't.