After greater than three years serving as head of San Antonio’s largest homeless shelter and sources hub, Kim Jefferies shall be leaving Haven for Hope later this 12 months to guide a brand new, out-of-state nonprofit with an identical mission.
“It’s bittersweet,” Jefferies advised the San Antonio Report on Wednesday. She declined to share the situation or identify of the nonprofit she’ll be main, however stated that she plans on replicating a lot of what Haven does in San Antonio.
“There’s nonetheless a tether to Haven, despite the fact that I’m leaving,” she stated, “as a result of I get to take the spirit and the center and the love and the novel compassion that’s right here with me to a brand new place and attempt to recreate that in one other group.”
Her final day as president and CEO of Haven is March 14. The nonprofit’s board has fashioned a search committee to seek out an government to guide Haven’s roughly 300 workers and $30 million working finances.
Since opening in 2010, Haven has served 1000’s of people and households, connecting them to housing and different companies.
The bitter chilly snap this week triggered emergency overflow shelters for individuals experiencing homelessness throughout the town, highlighting the vital work that Haven for Hope does each day, she stated.
Jefferies and different Haven employees spent a lot of Monday night time working with shoppers. She slept in her workplace on an inflatable mattress.
The subsequent CEO must deliver that very same power and dedication, Jefferies stated. She likened the job to being mayor of a small city with a inhabitants of roughly 1,700.
“Haven is bigger than 50% of the cities on this nation,” she stated, “nevertheless it’s individuals with essentially the most advanced points and challenges and boundaries of their lives. So the work isn’t simple, nevertheless it’s extremely rewarding.”
Haven has been praised nationally for its holistic method to homelessness response and prevention. There are 75 accomplice nonprofits that function on and off the 22-acre campus that present a bunch of companies, together with housing, meals, clothes, medical care, identification restoration and dental work. With beds in dorms, low barrier shelter and overflow services, Haven’s preliminarily 2024 report reveals it sheltered greater than 9,800 people final 12 months — that’s up by 4% over 2023. The variety of kids sheltered by Haven elevated by 28% to 1,388.
Jefferies’s departure is “unhappy information,” stated Barbara Gentry, who chairs Haven’s board, “however I might by no means attempt to speak somebody out of a extremely good alternative. And if there’s going to be somebody that’s going to recreate the idea of Haven for Hope in one other group, I can’t consider anybody higher than Kim.”
Gentry sees it as “an enormous praise” that Jefferies was sought out to guide this new nonprofit, “not only for Kim, however for Haven.”
Beneath Jefferies’ management, Gentry stated, the nonprofit has expanded its funder base, expanded applications, launched a pilot program in Leon Valley, supplied extra alternatives for workers to develop their skilled skillsets and added information assortment and evaluation sources to raised inform Haven’s programming.
“She may be very data-driven,” Gentry stated. “She will be able to again up the whole lot that everyone claims or says about Haven. She’s acquired the data.”
Jefferies will go away Haven “higher than she discovered it,” stated Erika Borrego, president and CEO of Corazón Ministries. “She has risen to the event in each problem and alternative that was put in entrance of her as a frontrunner for the group, as a frontrunner in our group and as a peer.”
Jefferies, who has two grownup kids, is a local San Antonian who earned a bachelor’s diploma in interdisciplinary research with a minor in enterprise administration from the College of Texas at San Antonio and a grasp’s diploma in nonprofit administration from Our Woman of the Lake College.
“I’m relocating to this different group for a time frame, however preserving my residence, my residence in San Antonio,” she stated. “It’s going to at all times be residence.”
Previous to becoming a member of Haven in 2021, Jefferies served because the CEO for 15 years of Brighton Middle San Antonio, which supplies training, remedy, and daycare for youngsters with and with out disabilities.
“She’s proven ardour and compassion and respect for everybody that involves Haven, and that’s vital,” Gentry stated. “She shall be exhausting to switch.”
It’s nonetheless unclear if Haven’s search committee will first want to pick out an inner interim chief whereas it carries out a wider seek for its subsequent chief, she stated.
“We’re going to make sure that our subsequent chief is engaged and passionate and dedicated and goes to proceed the work that Kim and others have began,” she stated.
Jefferies is the sixth chief of the nonprofit: Kenny Wilson, Jefferies’s predecessor, served for 5 years; Mark Carmona served three years; George Block served two years and founding president Robert Marbut Jr. departed shortly after Haven’s campus opened in 2010.
Whereas she is extremely happy with the work Haven’s employees does each day, one among her “largest regrets” shouldn’t be discovering a option to make the broader San Antonio group really feel the identical means.
Haven isn’t good and it could possibly’t resolve all of the systemic failures that result in homelessness, Jefferies stated, however few appear to grasp “how magical and great this factor is, and we form of take it without any consideration.”
She recalled a Haven resident who was recognized with terminal mind most cancers. Employees knew that he was reaching his closing hours and known as for an ambulance 3 times to take him to the hospital. And 3 times he refused to go.
When requested why, she recalled that he responded: “As a result of I need to die in a spot the place I do know individuals care about me and I don’t need to die alone.”
“We gave that to any person,” she stated. “We gave them dignity and love and care of their closing moments. That’s the wonder and the tragedy of Haven.”
