Open Door Home taking in more challenging youngsters
Director: Support from the community is critical.
One of Rome’s oldest charity providers has been providing a safe, home-like environment for foster children in the Rome area for more than 90 years — and it’s now finding itself in need of additional funding.
The Open Door Home’s Executive Director Lynn Rousseau said the facility is in the process of transitioning its resident base to children with more challenging needs.
Rousseau recalls that when she used to work for the Department of Family and Children Services she would take babies over to the facility. The home no longer takes children under the age of 12 without a waiver from the county DFCS director, but is focused on children between the ages of 12 and 18.
“Now, many of our kids tend to have behavioral issues,” Rousseau said.
The number of children in the program at both the girls home and boys home now totals 20 and is about half of what the home is licensed for.
That in turn has reduced the amount of reimbursement the facility gets from the state and that impacts the level of activities they’re available to offer to the kids.
“If it weren’t for the support of the community, we’d be in trouble,” Rousseau said.
She said the home was able to take the kids to Six Flags and Lake Winnepesaukah this summer. Activities like that would absolutely not be possible without the fundraising support of the community.
One of the more creative ways locals have raised
funds for the home has been a lemonade stand, started by an 11-year-old.
Seven years and many lemons later, Whit Molnar has now raised more than $30,000 for the Open Door Home through his Whit’s Lemonade and Cookies stand.
The lemonade stand started out as a means of helping a youngster learn something about the value of money. Now, his mom Sarah says it has become a community event that her son said he hopes to continue until he has to go away to college.
Molnar just presented the home with a check for $5,000, representing proceeds of his stand which was held on Aug. 1.
It was a miserable rainy day, but as testament to the young man and his family, friends turned the usual walk-up stand into a drivethrough this year. That, coupled with a large number of to-go orders, even a big order from the teachers at his school made the event another huge success.
“We try to figure out a way every year to up our game,” Sarah Molnar said. Over the years they’ve added chocolate covered pretzels and snicker doodle cookies to the items that are available to their friends and customers.
The Open Door Home will host another big fundraiser called Clubs and Clays for the Kids, a sporting clays or golf event at the Barnsley Gardens Resort on Sept. 20.
Get additional information at www.opendooorhome.org.