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15 Years Ago . . . . 

When we were getting Blessing House ready to open 15 years ago in a 3,000 square foot house, it seemed so big! There were 4 bedrooms upstairs, 3 offices, a playroom, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. There seemed to be plenty of room. There was. Until the children started to come and fill it up.

There have been almost 1,500 children who have filled these rooms during the last 15 years. Our children have been school-aged, toddlers and infants. Some have had special needs. We have cared for these children in this 3,000 square foot home, as many as 10 at a time. What at first seemed like such a big home turned out to not be very big after all.

Not enough room . . .

Over the years as more families learned about Blessing House, more called for help. Our waiting list is constant and it’s not unusual for us to have 40 to 50 children waiting to come and stay with us on any given day. But there just hasn't been enough room.

We have regular requests from Grandparents who are raising their grandchildren and need a break from the everyday responsibilities of childcare. Their grandchildren come and stay with us whenever we can get them in, but mostly, there isn’t enough room.

We get phone calls from parents who had to leave their homes and have not been able to find a place to stay. They are just moving from house to house and it has been hard on their children. We tell them we will have their children come as soon as we can, but, there just isn’t enough room.

There just isn’t enough room. A line repeated too often, accompanied with regret and frustration. 
We knew we needed to do something.  

Making plans . . .

Sr. Mary Berigan and the Blessing House Board of Directors decided to undertake a strategic planning process. In 2015, they began to meet with members of the community and staff to discover the greatest needs in the community that would guide Blessing House as it moved forward. Over the process of the next year and a half, a plan was developed to address three goals. The main goal of their focus would be to build a new facility for the children of Blessing House.

This new home would be larger to accommodate more children;  would have more space for a wider range of children’s activities and would be more efficient to make better use of staff’s time. Sr. Mary began a search of properties with potential, looking for that dream spot. But there was none to be found. We began to make plans to build.

A friend of Sr. Mary’s who was an architect helped us get started by designing a brand new building for us. With the ideas from this design Sr. Mary and several of the staff, sat down at the dining room table (while the children were sleeping of course since that is the only time it wasn’t being used) and dumped out a box of building blocks to design their new house.

After careful labeling of the blocks to represent the rooms they wanted, they started moving them around the table. They thought about what they had learned so far, where rooms should be, where children would be moving throughout the day, where they wanted to be able to do different activities, where they wanted things to be stored. They played with these blocks until finally, they had a rough draft. It looked like this:

This was the picture we gave to Ron Cocco, our architect. From this picture, Ron designed THIS:

Our plans are now on the way to becoming a reality. Thank you to everyone who has helped us along the way. Check back often and watch us grow!