Leslie Hill joins the Our Place Board

Our Place has made another great find! Leslie Hill has agreed to join our board. Leslie is full of enthusiasm about our project and has great networking skills that will assist us to reach out to the community.

Leslie recently retired from a career in early childhood education. She graduated from UNH, where she  studied child development, early education and humanities. Leslie studied Montessori methods at NEMI, and also studied Special Education and teacher training at Wheelock College, while working as an Education Coordinator for Head Start.

Leslie worked in the field for 10 years before starting My First School at Friendship House in Hampton (1986-2019). She  designed classrooms to support children with learning disorders, and sought early intervention services for her students with disabilities. She enjoys spending time with her family, boating, hiking, and playing with her dog, Duncan..

Our Place Welcomes Tom Keane to Board of Directors

The Our Place Board of Directors is excited to announce our newest board member, attorney Tom Keane from Keane & MacDonald, PC.

Tom has extensive experience in real estate and conveyance law representing both lenders and borrowers, as well as corporate and business law. Additionally, he has broad experience in the hospitality industry, including in the acquisition, development, operation and sale of hotels and resorts. While he is focused on these areas, his practice is broadly defined, and he also handles certain civil litigation, family and estate planning matters.

Tom is a member of the New Hampshire Bar Association (Corporate and Business Section).

Tom is a former Trustee and Vice Chairman of the Foundation for Seacoast Health and remains active in the non-profit community throughout the seacoast. He is a graduate of St. Michael’s College (1972) and George Mason School of Law (1977).

Our Place Becomes "Incubator Project" with GoodWork

Our Place was chosen in January to be a member of the GoodWork 2021 Incubator Cohort. We receive free executive coaching, connections to several professionals that help us with technical support and have been assigned a wonderful mentor in Martha Stone from Cross Roads House . Laurie McIntosh participates in monthly programs that address business planning, market research and fund development.

Molly Hodgson and Maria Sillari from GoodWork

UNH Marketing Students Help Our Place

For the spring semester we had a team of students helping us from UNH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics. These senior students accomplished a lot in a short time. It was very helpful to see our project from their perspective and learn more about how we can get the word out to the community. They created surveys to help us understand community values and community knowledge about housing for adults with developmental disabilities. They set up a GoFundMe page that we can activate later. The students showed us how to improve our presence on social media and how to create more interesting graphics. They helped to make our website easier to navigate and more useful. We have gained so much from this experience and hope we can partner with UNH again in the future.

Leigh Rohde Joins Our Place Board

Leigh Rohde

We are very happy to announce that Leigh Rohde has joined the board of directors at Our Place. A longtime resident of the New Hampshire seacoast, Leigh lives in South Hampton and is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Salem State University. She is mother to three adult children, including her son Peter, who has Down syndrome. Leigh will be working on the fundraising committee. "I'm excited to join this group, working to find positive residential opportunities for adults with developmental disabilities."

Our Place Team Completes Housing Institute

Team Members working on the project. Clockwise from lower left: Laurie McIntosh, Ron Walton, Ben Sahl, Phil Desmond, Jackie Hookway, Rob Baldwin.

Our Place applied to be included in a Supportive Housing Institute hosted by the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority and the Corporation for Supportive Housing. Our application was accepted and we sent a team to the Institute which was scheduled to meet two days a month from January to June 2020. Because of Covid 19, we ended up switching to remote learning after our March class and the institute was extended through the summer. The goal of the institute was to teach development teams from around the state everything that they would need to know to develop a supportive housing project. With Our Place in mind, we sent representatives from our board along with Jackie Hookway from Community Partners, the area agency that has agreed to be our service partner, Rob Baldwin from Central Falls Realty who agreed to be our development partner for the institute, and Ben Sahl who is the attorney who wrote the “Toolbook” created by Visions. 

The Institute taught our team how to work together as a team with a service agency and developer to create a viable project. We learned how to look at quality indicators to make sure that Our Place will have the highest standards. Learning units included information about the laws for fairness in housing and how to respect racial equality. We learned about the different roles of the service provider, developer, building manager and how they communicate with each other. The institute covered service budgets, operating budgets, development budgets, service plans, selection plans, leasing and applications. The basics of property management were explained as well as how to design a building that meets our needs and the needs of our population. And finally we learned what it takes to build a good relationship with the community and gain community support for a project like Our Place. 

We are very grateful to the instructors from the Corporation for Supportive Housing as well as the staff from New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority for providing this valuable learning experience. Not only did they help us design a great project, but they will continue to stand by us with support and advice as we move forward. 

Our Place Receives Donations and Matching Funds Through Benevity

Our Place is now one of the charities that can be selected for matching company funds through Benevity, a software company that powers corporate giving, volunteering, and grant-making solutions for hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies from around the globe. Companies such as Liberty Mutual, Microsoft, John Deere and Starbucks offer this service to their employees so that charitable giving is easy and effective. Check with your company to see if they use Benevity and if you can make donations which will be matched. This is a win-win for you and for Our Place.

Our Place Receives $5K Grant from New Hampshire Charitable Foundation

In conjunction with NH Gives, Our Place received a $5000 grant from the Matthew Sherman Memorial Fund which is an advised fund from New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. We are thrilled with this generous donation because it will allow us to strengthen the foundation of our organization. The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation is New Hampshire’s statewide community foundation, founded in 1962 by and for the people of New Hampshire. The Foundation manages a growing collection of nearly 2,000 funds created by generous individuals, families and businesses, and awards nearly $40 million in grants and more than $6 million in scholarships every year. The Foundation works with generous and visionary citizens to maximize the power of their giving, supports great work happening in our communities and leads and collaborates on high-impact initiatives. For more information, please visit www.nhcf.org or call 603-225-6641.

Thank You New Hampshire Charitable Foundation!

Our Place Raises $44,625 with NH Gives!

Doug, Sam, and Dan say, “Thank you for supporting Our Place!”

Only a few weeks after receiving their 501c3 nonprofit status from the IRS, the Our Place board of directors sprang into action to let everyone know about NH Gives. We posted on social media, emailed and called all our friends and family and got people psyched to donate to this great cause. The community came back with such a show of support that we far exceeded our initial goals. It was a very exciting 24 hours.

The first $250,000 of the fund drive was matched by the New Hampshire Charitable Trust. We managed to claim $4000 of that money. It was gone in the first few minutes! Our donors kept on giving throughout the 24-hour fundraiser and we watched the numbers soar.

With this money we can really get Our Place off the ground. We will be able to pay for grant writing assistance and more publicity to get more corporate sponsors. We actually have a bank account now and some employers such as Liberty Mutual have added us as a charity for donations with matching funds for their employees. We can’t express enough how grateful we are to all the people who have donated to Our Place and we also thank NHGives for letting us be a part of this amazing fundraiser.

Here is the link to the article about Our Place in Seacoast On-line!

https://www.fosters.com/news/20200105/where-will-they-live-mom-works-to-create-home-for-special-needs-adults