Community must embrace partnership for long-term health of care center
Published 12:17 pm Tuesday, September 22, 2015
For some I am the Captain of the Lighthouse; for others I am a Voice of Vashon every Tuesday morning with Truman and Bob on Morning Scramble. Truman calls me at home, and I am allowed to talk about anything I want starting at 8:30 a.m. This started out with my talking about what is happening out at the lighthouse for five minutes and has expanded into a longer segment in which I comment on various aspects of island life. Every Tuesday from now until we blow the top of the Thermometer House off, and replace it with an American flag, I will be talking about Vashon Community Care (VCC), the people who live there and the partnership that the island community must embrace with us for the continued health of VCC.
The Thermometer House — you may have seen it on the corner of Bank Road and Vashon Highway, holding down the U.S. Bank corner. I talk with a lot of people in the course of a day, and I try to weave in some discussion of Vashon Community Care and how it is funded. I will not go into the history, but instead will confirm what I have said many times before. The ability to provide a place like VCC depends on the island community being our partner financially as well as providing us with our residents. It is not enough for us to be the haven for island residents, many of whom cannot pay for their care. To be candid, and I am the Candid Captain, those who can afford to be more robust financial partners must pick up some of the slack for those who cannot.
A few days ago, I was at a gathering of gentlemen, all of a certain age. As I am over 80, that gives you some idea of how old these troops were. Question: “Captain Joe, how can an operation like VCC be sustainable?” The answer has been cleaned up a little — I fail the Captain’s Language Improvement Program frequently — but goes like this. “It can be sustained only if the island community will be our partner with money as well as our partner in providing us with our residents.” Every non-profit on this island, the Magical Isle of Vashon, has as one of its budget elements “donations” or “fundraising” or whatever the organization wants to call it. Some depend almost solely on public contributions. So to be “sustainable,” the community must be as generous with their family members at the end of their lives as they are with the beginning of life in the schools, the middle of life with the arts and pets and those in difficulty all through their lives.
The Thermometer House came about because we are more than half way through the year, and we are nowhere near the $500,000 that is in the 2015 budget. The arrow on the house tells all of us that. That 500K was not some fanciful number, some hope, some wish, but a number derived by making the best assumptions we could for all income and the same assumptions for our expenses. Subtracting one from the other, with a small genuflection in the direction of a tiny reserve, came up with 500K. It did not seem to me then, nor does it now, to be a difficult task to ask from this community half a million dollars to take care of many who cannot financially or in other ways take care of themselves.
This is a personal crusade for me. My mother, whose nickname in the family was Toots, lived the last five years of her life at VCC. I continue to serve on the board as the treasurer, and I am as committed to this place, its survival and its growth as I am to anything in my life. Even the cleaning of my carport, and thus my marriage, have been set aside sometimes to do some work in the VCC vineyard. I am a sustaining donor; I am a cash donor, and I put in a lot of time to keep us afloat. I lust in my soul for the kind of response that goes to Vashon Allied Arts for its new building, as one family said, rising like a ship from the pit.
Every family has at least one Toots. Mine is with us only in memory, and my gift to her is to make sure that her room, #124, is occupied and funded. Your conscience is being plucked here. You may not know when you will need to have your Toots come to us, and when it happens, we have to be there. And that can happen only when the community works with us to make it so. I need to see that arrow come roaring out of the top of the Thermometer House, cash now, action this day.
— “Captain Joe” Wubbold is the treasurer of both Vashon Community Care and the Vashon Community Care Foundation.
