A tale from craigslist...

Author: Kate Record

Earlier this morning, someone posted the following:

“People on craigslist do not donate anything to IHS it doesn’t' t go to the homeless it goes to the STAFF first they take the nice ones than goes to the homeless if you want to donate to a church or a other program ALL staff are getting paid a federal pay 10 plus an hour. SO donate to the volunteers not IHS. They say its a nonprofit program yes it is and it help the homeless. But it the STAFF is the ones that is taking it first not the homeless. plus its our FEDERAL tax money going to this program”

IHS, The Institute for Human Services, would like to respond to this misinformation.

IHS is a comprehensive social services agency that is dedicated to ending the cycle of homelessness AND preventing homelessness in Hawaii.

We have a wide variety of programs that work together to accomplish these goals. Please feel free to visit www.ihshawaii.org to learn more about them. We strongly believe in transparency and publish an annual report each year and post it publicly on our website. AND we pride ourselves in being good stewards of gifts given to us and leverage almost every dollar with others to make them go a long way.

To ensure that IHS has dedicated staff to end and prevent homelessness, we pay employees a decent competitive wage. We all know how expensive it is to live in Hawaii – and we take pride in the fact that we do NOT pay any employee minimum wage – but neither are any of our salaries at the top of the scale compared to comparable positions in other non-profits.

We have well over 2,000 volunteers (from individuals and groups) that help IHS each year – and we cherish these volunteers, for without them, we wouldn’t be able to serve 635+ meals each day or the 3700 people each year.

IHS staff members do NOT have first access to donations of goods – however, in the event that a staff member is in need OR when we have an excess amount of donations that the guests cannot use and we can find no other agency to with whom to share them, we do offer them to staff occasionally. We’ve all heard that many people in Hawaii are just one or two paychecks away from being homeless – and unfortunately some IHS staff could fall into that category as well. In those cases, IHS absolutely assists our staff in the same way (nothing more, nothing less) that we assist the 1,200+ homeless individuals that walk through our doors each year.

While IHS receives a generous amount of federal funding –(almost 40% of our annual expenditures), the majority of it goes directly to rental subsidies for chronically homeless individuals through our Shelter + Care program. Those federal funds don’t cover the remaining 60% of our budget – much of which we need the community’s help with to keep our doors open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

IHS welcomes questions from the community – please feel free to post questions or comments to our Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/Instituteforhumanservices?v=wall&ref=ts), or email info@ihs-hawaii.org.