Support runners on the 2012 Haven team!

The Covered Bridges Half Marathon was first run in 1992. Race founder David Chioffi and a group of community members got together to create a half marathon along some of the best running routes around Woodstock, Vermont. The course they designed was unique because of the four covered bridges along the way, two of which the runners ran through.

The race is organized by a completely volunteer staff, under the corporate umbrella of CBHM, Inc., a non-profit corporation formed specifically to organize running events and donate the proceeds to charity. The race donates more than $30,000 each year to local non-profit groups focused on youth activities and youth sports in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. In recent years, groups have used the race to inspire volunteers to seek pledges for their respective causes, raising as much as $130,000.

Each year the Haven has 50 registration spots for the race. We gather a team of runners who fundraise for us by raising sponsorships dollars.  Come join our team, run for a great cause, meet new friends and go home with the most stylish team shirt on the market today!

Questions? Please e-mail or call Karina Olson at 802-478-1804.

White River Junction — Brittney Bennett and Janna Jarvis could be sisters.

They laugh at the suggestion — Bennett, 24, is originally from Connecticut, and Jarvis, 36, previously lived in Randolph. It’s not so much about their looks, either. Both women boast thin, athletic frames, but Bennett’s long, dark hair remains pulled back from her square face and light complexion, while Jarvis, a little bit taller and a little bit tanner, has blond highlights in her bangs, cut straight across her narrow forehead.

It’s more about the way the women interact: Laughing, teasing. Joining each other at a nearby picnic table for a cigarette and a chat, to talk about their kids, to talk about life. Their newborn daughters were born eight days apart, and they helped each other pick out baby names. (Bennett chose Isabella; Jarvis, Olyvia.)

Mostly they laugh because, as close as they they’ve become, they’ve known each other for only a few months. Their friendship grew out of circumstance: After hardship befell them and each woman spent two months moving from motel to motel just to get by, they met when they became roommates at the Byrne House, a homeless shelter for families at the Upper Valley Haven.

Their story is one that, Haven officials say, has become increasingly common in the Upper Valley: The economic crisis of 2008 dramatically intensified demand for basic services, said Haven Executive Director Sara Kobylenski.

The number of families who spend some part of the year at Byrne House has usually hovered around 40, remaining fairly level because of its eight-family maximum capacity.

But more than 1,000 families use the Haven’s food shelf every month, up from 450 families when Kobylenski took the reins three years ago. And an estimated 50 people are homeless in the Upper Valley every night.

“Somehow I don’t have any reason to think we’ll be licking the poverty problem in the Upper Valley any time in my lifetime, probably,” she said.

A second Haven shelter for adults without minor children, the Hixon House, opened in June 2010. Last year, a total of 146 adults spent some time at the Hixon House, which averaged 20 people a night.

Before that, adult individuals in need of temporary housing were forced to travel as far as Claremont, Rutland, Barre, Lancaster, Plymouth and Keene. From November to April, they could apply for the Tri-County Community Action Program’s 10 Bricks hotel vouchers, which served 275 adults during the 2009-10 winter season — up from 196 the year prior.

Only 151 people used the program in 2006-07.

Stories like Bennett’s and Jarvis’s are also increasingly common. People who rely on the Haven — from those who stop by to pick up some of the 100,000 pounds of produce distributed yearly, to the groups and individuals who use it as a temporary home — have come to see it as more than just a bed or a roof or a meal, but as a foot in the door to a network of resources, and a community that can help navigate them.

“I never knew what structure was until they taught me how to live a structured life,” Bennett said recently, sitting outside the Haven at a picnic table with Jarvis. “It kind of becomes like a big family. You need somebody that you’re able to talk to. It’s hard.”

“When your life is so in shambles,” Jarvis added, “and everything is so out of whack and you’re going from motel to motel … you get in here, and everything gets done.”

That support is being provided to the people who need it most, said Kobylenski. Many people who were living “on the edge,” so to speak, teetered off into poverty during the Great Recession. They’re families like those that used to benefit from two incomes, but now only have one. Sometimes they’re families that previously donated to the food shelf, but now need it to feed their own children.

“We have people that are coming to the food shelf who have never used social services of any sort in their lives, who have not needed the help to get by,” Kobylenski said. “That’s a population of people that’s new to the Haven.”

And even as the economy begins to show signs of improvement, life for many people may continue to get worse, Kobylenski said. She pointed to a theory that “those who are most fragile in terms of getting their most basic needs back continue to go downhill for another 18 months” after the economy begins to turn around.

“And we’re testing that theory right now,” she said. “We’re watching for this, because there’s some belief that things are starting to improve now, and if that’s the case, we’re optimistic that maybe this trend of increasing demand on our services every single month for the last three years might continue only for another 18 months.

“Of course what we don’t know is … when we then get to that point, will the need decrease some? Will it simply level off at that new normal? What will it look like for this community? And we don’t know yet.”

‘People Need Things’
On a recent Tuesday morning, the front door at the Haven’s Route 5 compound rarely closed all the way before somebody else was there to open it. The steady stream of people is pretty normal these days, volunteers said.

“They help just so many people, it’s insane,” said Amy Blanchette as she volunteered in what is known as the “sorting room.” Blanchette, who was living at the Haven but has since moved out, has friends who have stayed in shelters that are little more than a clean bed and a roof over your head, she said. But to her, the Haven is different.

“It’s nothing like that here,” she said. “You’re family.”

Kobylenski said it can be particularly difficult to get donations during this time of year, when the public’s attention is turned to other things — spring cleaning, graduation, getting ready for summer.

In the kitchen area, near the front entrance, volunteer Lisa Cadow has started to prepare a cheese-less frittata. Cadow, who runs Vermont Crepe & Waffle out of Norwich, started volunteering once a week last December for the Haven’s Healthy Eating Program, which shows people how to use healthy food available at the food shelf to make interesting meals, and provides easy directions and a bag of ingredients for people to take home.

Past dishes have included tomato and ginger soup with yellow peppers, mashed potato and turnip, ratatouille and green bean casserole.

“It’s an amazingly innovative program,” Cadow said, adding that it presents an interesting challenge because the meals must be made using whatever happens to be available in large quantities at the food shelf that day — hence the frittata sans cheese.

In the sorting room next door, volunteers spend seven hours a day, five days a week, sifting through bag after bag of donated clothing. In addition to its staff of 30, the Haven relies on 430 volunteers to keep the organization running, Kobylenski said. More than 150 people volunteer at the Haven any given week.

Some of them are members of the greater Upper Valley community, like Cadow. And others, like Blanchette, are current and former Haven guests looking to give back. Blanchette sorts the clothes into categories — men’s or women’s, shoes or bedding, kids’ or babies’. If the clothes are in decent condition, they’re washed and put out on the rack for the public to take.

“They go out just as fast as they put them out,” said Brenda Bartlett, another guest who was working in the sorting room with Blanchette.

“A lot of people need things.”

‘You’re Not Alone’
In the afternoon, the another Haven-owned home — Bev’s House, named for the late community and social justice activist Beverly Fowle Fiertz — is teeming with children who have arrived for the after-school program, available to current and former child guests of Byrne House. Volunteers from Dartmouth College and the wider community volunteer to help with homework or simply watch the youngsters as they play on swings, make art, play music — just be kids.

The program is open to children from kindergarten to high school. Last month, there were 12 children participating, ages 6 to 13, including Morgan Asselin, 8, a former Byrne House guest who now lives in downtown White River Junction.

Sitting upstairs, she used white crayon to draw stars and a moon, which reappeared on the page after she glossed over them with blue watercolor paint.

“It’s really fun. We get to do a lot of stuff,” she said.

In a room across the hall, volunteer Allyson Ledoux plays an electric keyboard as she teaches Megan Fogg, 9, another former guest, how to create rhythms and beats by singing along.

“Something magical just happened,” Ledoux tells Fogg after the youngster correctly sings back a tune. “You just did that all in your head. … Look at that smile on your face.”

At the other end of the Haven property, adult guests of the Hixon House are gathering in its cafeteria — some of them returning from jobs or volunteering, and many of them waiting for one of three meals the Haven provides its guests each day.

Pam Picknell had stayed in the original home family shelter with her family in the 1980s, she said, before moving on, getting a job, and helping raise her grandchildren in the Newport-Springfield area. After winning two bouts with cancer and with the grandkids out of the nest, she decided to move back to White River Junction to get her old job back, but needed help getting back on her feet, and moved into the Hixon House.

“The lives that they’ve touched, I can’t even fathom. … The transition this program has made from this little tiny house to all of this,” she said, pointing to a picture of the original home hanging on a wall, and then gesturing to the building around here.

“They go through that whole process with you,” she said. “You’re not alone. And it’s just crazy.”

‘Completely Satisfied’
But the Hixon House is the shelter that almost never was. Amid protests from neighbors who raised safety concerns about the size and location of the shelter, the Haven abandoned a proposal to build the shelter on Pine Street in 2006, and was turned down in an attempt later that year to build on Mechanic Street.

As the Haven forged ahead with plans to build the Hixon House in a lot adjacent to its Route 5 headquarters, which used to be the barn-house family shelter until the new Byrne House was opened in 2004, residents continued to protest. Thirty-three townspeople signed a petition in opposition to the expansion, which was presented to the Zoning Board of Adjustment during a meeting in 2008.

Yet two years after it opened its doors, many of those concerns appear to have been quelled. Longtime Hartford Avenue resident Doc Simon was one of several neighbors to voice apprehension during that meeting, but ultimately, Simon said last week, the Hixon House hasn’t been a problem to him.

“I’m completely satisfied by it,” he said. “They seem to be over by themselves. There’s nobody crossing the yards.”

“It hasn’t turned out to be a problem at all, now has it? I’m not even aware that they’re there,” said Doris Grigel, who lives nearby on Demers Avenue with her husband, George, who had expressed concerns around the shelter’s opening.

“It never materialized,” she said.

Several other residents who voiced concerns during that meeting did not respond to requests for comment. Kobylenski said she has been in touch with many of them and they have voiced feelings similar to those expressed by Simon and the Grigels: The shelter was the dog that never barked.

And for people like Terri Cardillo, it filled a void.

Cardillo said she waited for more than a month to get into the Hixon House; other guests said it took them as long as two months to become guests.

“They need to have more of these,” Cardillo said. “There’s a lot of people that are homeless out there. … You can only couch-surf for so long.”

When you’re homeless, she said, “you feel like you’re on a one-way street — a dead-end street.” But that feeling is tempered when you’re at the Haven, she said, where case managers help guests connect with nonprofit and governmental agencies to help get their lives back together.

“The people here try really hard to lead you in that right direction,” she said, “but they ask for us to try to do it on (our) own.”

‘An Amazing Resource’
At the end of a long day, Bennett returned to the kitchen of the apartment she’s staying at in the Byrne House. There are two wings of the Byrne House; four families stay in each. More than 20 children are at the house on any given night, Kobylenski said.

The setting sun brightened the room, which resembles the communal area of a college dormitory: lightly colored walls, high ceilings, large windows, two refrigerators, an island table in the kitchen.

As she cooked a hot homemade dinner — chicken and mashed potatoes — Bennett explained that, just recently, she had learned that infant Isabella was born with Down syndrome.

She and Jarvis bonded over their struggles with their newborns: Jarvis’ child, Olyvia, was born six weeks premature.

Tara Mullen, of Vershire, one of the Haven’s two community case managers, walked in from the yard, looking for a chat. The talk turned to the baby. “You’re in the beginning of this revolving door. … It’s an adventure,” Mullen said.

Bennett responds with confidence.

“It’s a challenge,” she tells Mullen, “but I can handle it. You’d be proud if you could see the way I’m going about my day. … Good will come, and if the bad comes, I can handle it.”

“And,” Mullen responds, “there will be support.”

Later, Mullen said, it’s that support that drew her to work at the Haven.

“Its name — it is a haven. It’s amazing the number of calls we get, like, ‘I called you because nobody else would return my call,’ ” Mullen said. “It’s an amazing resource.”

Jarvis’ daughter, Olyvia, is waking up from a nap. Chicken and mashed potatoes still on the stove, Bennett walks over, and takes the infant in her arms.

The two women stand over her, smiling.

“You can tell she’s happy here,” Bennett said.

http://www.vnews.com/05132012/9538122.htm

Montcalm Golf Club is a private club designed by George Sargent that has a 6,927 yard course that covers 358 acres of land in the pristine mountain region of Enfield, New Hampshire. Montcalm was awarded a Golf Digest award in 2005 as one of the Top Ten Best New Private Courses in the country, and was again acknowledged in 2007 by the magazine as one of the Best in New Hampshire. It continually receives rave reviews from members and guests who enjoy the complete privacy and exquisite beauty that is Montcalm. Learn more about Montcalm golf course….

Date: Friday, September 14, 2012
Rain Date: Monday, September 17, 2012
Location: Montcalm
Schedule: Mid-morning start; late-afternoon reception & awards
Format: Shamble

A shamble is a type of golf tournament that combines elements of a scramble with elements of stroke play. All members of a team tee off and the best ball of the four tee shots is selected. All players move their balls to the spot of the best ball. From this point, the hole is played out at stroke play, with all members of the team playing their own ball into the hole.

Price: $1,200 per foursome (includes lunch, greens fees, cart, prizes and awards reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres and drinks!) or $325 for individuals

Sponsorship opportunities available.

To register, email or call Karina at gro.nevahyellavreppunull@noslok or 802.478.1804!  Space is limited!

Questions?  Call or email Karina at 802-478-1804 or gro.nevahyellavreppunull@noslok.

The Haven’s 8th Annual Benefit Concert will be held on Saturday, October 22nd at Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre.  This year we have lined up Tom Rush with the help of Pentangle Arts Council.  Tom Rush is a gifted musician and performer, whose shows offer a musical celebration… a journey into the tradition and spectrum of what music has been, can be, and will become. His distinctive guitar style, wry humor and warm, expressive voice have made him both a legend and a lure to audiences around the world. His shows are filled with the rib-aching laughter of terrific story-telling, the sweet melancholy of ballads and the passion of gritty blues.

Who: TOM RUSH

When: October 22, 2010  8pm

Where: Woodstock Town Hall Theater

Buy tickets!

Don’t miss out on this exciting concert and opportunity to support the Haven!

Learn more about Tom Rush…

To sponsor this event, contact Karina Olson at gro.nevahyellavreppunull@noslok or 802-478-1804.

Thank you to our sponsors!

Haven Family Friends:
Andrea’s
Lake Morey Resort
Lake Sunapee Bank
MJ Hayward Mechanical
Wells River Savings Bank

 3^rd Annual Cinco de Mayo Extravaganza

When? May 5^th

What Time? 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm

Where? Alumni Hall in the Hopkins Center

Why? To have fun and raise support for the Haven!

Each year, Project RightChoice selects a great organization to support in a 12-month fundraising campaign. In 2012, we have chosen the Upper Valley Haven, an organization with which Dartmouth has had a long collaboration and which is near and dear to our hearts. We invite all supporters to buy raffle tickets and attend the Extravaganza to make this May 5^th the best Cinco de Mayo yet! 100% of the proceeds will be donated to the Haven.

We have secured a fantastic Latin band, Alejandro & Grupo Sabor, to provide live music for the event, and Gusanoz will be providing a delicious Mexican buffet for all attendees! There will also be raffle and door prize drawings throughout the night, and plenty of dancing and games!

Raffle tickets for the Extravaganza are $20 and act as reservations for the event. Only the first 200 people who buy tickets to attend the event will be able to attend due to the size of the hall, so buy your raffle tickets early! However, you can still win any of our great prize if you are not in attendance! For more information about the Cinco de Mayo Extravaganza or Project RightChoice, please e-mail us at ude.htuomtraDnull@eciohCthgiR.tcejorP or visit us online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rightchoice.

Thank you for your support!

Project RightChoice

The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation (NHCF) has issued a challenge to our supporters.

They will give the Haven $5,000 if we raise $10,000 by June 30th, 2012. Be the first to make an Annual Fund gift in our new fiscal year, and help us secure $5,000 for those in need in our community!

Donate

Let’s spring forward to summer with a Sunglasses at Night themed summer party on Friday, March 30th, 2012 at the beautiful Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction, VT.

21+ BYOB

…
Bring a non-perishable food item, clothing, or other donation item for those in need. We will donate these items to The Haven. If you bring something, you will be eligible to win a gift certificate to The Pink Alligator in Hanover, NH! Working on other possible gifts as well.
…

We will have the beautiful hoop-dance light show provided by Jamie Riley from Manchester, NH along with a guest hooper; plus they will be clothed in The Pink Alligator’s clothes!

House music provided by DJ ShaR4 featuring Guest Lyricist Dov!! –< Amazing vocalist!!

Opening set by Medastep

200,000 watt sound system and amazing laser show by Manuel Almeida.

www.curves.com

Thank you to the Hanover, Lebanon and White River Junction Curves!

Aline is a Master Pastelist with the Pastel Society of America and has been accepted to national juried shows of the Oil Painters of America & the American Pastel Society. Her work appeared in The Pastel Journal April 2010 as a winner in both the Figure and Landscape categories of the top 100 Pastels of 2009.

Tickets cost:
$10/ticket —— $20/3 tickets ——- $50/10 tickets

Print out the PDF below and send it, with your payment, to:

Upper Valley Haven
713 Hartford Ave
White River Junction, VT 05001

Raffle ticket

Learn more about Aline Ordman…

2012 MUD BALL DATE: March 17
7pm to 8pm - complimentary beer, wine and specialty drinks
8pm to Midnight
Live Music by Disco Inferno
Title sponsor: Global Forest Partners

View photos from the 2012 event…

Each year a local philanthropic committee comes together to organize and host the Mud Ball which benefits the Haven.  All are welcome and 100% of proceeds are donated to the Haven.

The committee always secures a fabulous band, and although dancing and crazy shoe wear may be the predominant theme, great food is provided the Hanover Inn, and there is always fabulous decorations and a brilliant silent auction display!

Mud Ball 2011 raised $30,000 for the Haven children’s summer programs. Thanks to these dollars many children staying at the Haven, or children associated with the shelter, were able to take advantage of the many wonderful summer options offered around the Upper Valley.  Children thrived in experiences that included art, nature and adventure day camps, gardening, field trips to the ocean, mountain climbing, and strength training programs.

Tickets for the Mud Ball are $75 per person in advance or $85 at the door.  For more information about Mud Ball 2012 please call (603.643.9405) or e-mail Amy Redpath, or for more information on the Haven please call or email Karina Olson at 802-478-1804.

 Thank you to our sponsors!
Title Sponsor:

Disco Sponsors:

Mud Treats Sponsors:

Mud Ball Contributors: