Following decades of wear and tear on its downtown Bloomington building, the nonprofit Recycling Furniture for Families needs its own community service.
The faith-based group that supplies people in need with furniture for their living spaces is raising money to replace its roof.
“We’ve been doing patchwork jobs/repairs, but it’s time that we need to get a new roof,” Executive Director Frank Downes said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “To do this right we need to have the old roof taken off, [and] we need to have a new roof put on that’s tapered so the water doesn’t just sit on the roof, it runs into the back of the building. We’ll need a whole new gutter system as well.”
The total cost to replace the roof and gutters is about $160,000.
“We’ve reached out to everyone for donations, and right now pretty much all of it has come from private donations, from individuals,” Downes said.
Recycling Furniture for Families has raised nearly $23,000 since it began fundraising. If it cannot raise the $160,000 to replace its roof and gutters, Downes said the organization will need to sell the building and relocate.
Downes noted the nonprofit has served an average of 500 McLean County families each year since its founding in 2002.
“Most of them are a single parent, [or] a female head-of-household. Eight percent of the people we help are coming out of domestic violence situations. The thing we’ve been doing that’s unique lately is because of the immigration issue that’s going on right now, we’ve been helping people coming in from all over the world — we actually helped a couple families from Ukraine,” Downes said, adding the community’s rising homeless population will also likely place greater demand for their services.
Domestic violence cases may only be 8% of what the organization serves today, but it was the driving force behind its inception in 2002.
“We had an officer in 2002 named Doug Poag. He was called to a lot of domestic violence situations where the families would be displaced,” Downes said. “He would go check on the families and the young children would be sleeping on the floor.”
Recycling Furniture for Families’ mission is to provide furniture for families who are not equipped to supply themselves with the necessary furniture for an adequate living situation.
“The average cost to furnish an apartment is $6,000 for a family,” Downes said. “So we’ve put $60 million of donated furniture into our community."
