In the Auburn Youth Resources Dick Brugger Building on F Street Southeast, the worker bees were so tightly packed that Jim Blanchard even had a joke about it.
“Hey, what’s the problem with putting up tents and canopies and working outside?” AYR’s director would say.
All kidding aside, the tight quarters were a cheek-by-jowl issue to employees there, crimping a vital agency working on behalf of local kids in the throes of ever-expanding need. The agency offers programs for homeless youth, places to go to stay out of trouble, a teen feed night, a drop-in center and drug and alcohol prevention services,
“Things got to the point where we were asking ourselves, ‘where do we have space, and how do we get there,” recalled Joe Hochwalt, a member of AYR’s board of directors.
Then, as if the sky had opened to drop the most golden of opportunities in AYR’s lap, Valley Medical Center in 2014 closed its medical clinic next door to its main offices on Auburn Way South.
On April 30, AYR cut the ribbon on its new mental health therapy digs, threw open its doors and let people in to gawk at the wonder of it all, two months after 15 of its therapists quietly moved in.
Turns out, the building is an AYR natural, dotted with former medical exam rooms, where therapists can do their thing without crowding elbows or bumping knees, that thing being performing individual therapy, conducting parent-child interaction training and doing art therapy, among other services.
“We use this as kind of the home base to go out and work with families, and we’re looking at this as our home commitment to Auburn for a long time to come,” said Blanchard. “It has almost doubled our capacity, and we’re still doing some renovation; we’re not quite through. We’re still going after some capital dollars to make a big conference room in the middle of the building. We want to upgrade even some of the therapy rooms so we can split them and increase our capacity even more. And it’s a much better place for staff to be refreshed so they can go back and serve the clients.”
The purchase deal came together in under six months, Hochwalt recalled with amazement.
“It sort of started off with an ‘I wonder if’ at a board meeting, and from there it germinated to ‘well, we have a small shot,’ Barely three months later we got a deal structured. The bank wanted us to do a couple of things, and the meeting after that, we’re signing papers.”
Former Seattle Seahawk Michael Jackson, AYR’s development director, was a fundraising wonder worker.
“He (Jackson) brings a lot of energy to his job. When we go knocking on the doors of the Brinks Foundation, Gates Foundation, looking for funding, to have a guy on our staff say, “Hey, I’m Michael Jackson,’ and have the other guy say, ‘oh, you played football didn’t you?’ And all of a sudden you’ve got an immediate connection. We didn’t have that before. Now he’s got his foot in the door, and can make that elevator speech and we don’t have to explain. He’s just really good at looking at these agreements and working with the state. He’s how we’ve gotten funding for some of the improvements we’re going to do,” Hochwalt said.
“Even in the three years I’ve been on the board, our budget has grown tremendously, and the need continues to be out there. This need has shown there’s a big pie out there to serve a big population, and we’re a small part of it,” Hochwalt said.
