New Leaf was a tremendous asset to the LGBT community. Thank you New Leaf. Thank you to the directors, the staff and the volunteers. You are all so very necessary to our community. This is a very sad story from the Bay Area Reporter:
An LGBT nonprofit that provides mental health, substance abuse, and senior services announced this week that it has run out of money and will close its doors by the middle of October.
The board of directors of New Leaf: Services for Our Community voted unanimously August 15 at an emergency meeting to begin the process to dissolve the agency, which turned 35 this year. The closure is due to the fact that the agency is no longer fiscally sustainable, Thom Lynch, interim executive director of New Leaf, and Barbara Garcia, deputy director of health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, told the Bay Area Reporter Monday.
"There were a lot of tears around the table. Some of the board members were former clients at New Leaf; one was a long-term client. This hits people personally," said Lynch, who stepped into the troubled organization 10 months ago in an attempt to fix it. "It's very, very sad, but I'm also really proud of the organization for taking a really hard look at itself and making a tough decision."
The deadly mix: a dearth of necessary financial resources combined with rising operational costs on top of high operational expenses. Some former employees also pointed to poor management. All of that was compounded by the economic crisis.
One of the contributors was the agency's lease, which Lynch said was "expensive" at nearly $33,000 per month, and has three and a half years left. City budget cuts were also a factor, he said.
"We've explored every possible way that we could to have the organization continue," said Lynch, no longer hopeful that an "angel" philanthropist who could afford $300,000 or more a year to support the agency will appear. "But it's not only about the organization continuing. It's about providing good services. There comes a point where the quality of the services is so damaged that we just can't continue to do that fairly to the clients or the community."
Read the rest of the story at the BAR
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