Since October 2014, Phil Jones has been the executive director of House of Care, but his involvement with the nonprofit organization actually began in 2010 when he served as an administrator and director. House of Care is a five-bedroom nonprofit personal-care home in State College dedicated to serving those with extremely low income, little-to-no family support, and requiring assistance with activities of daily living.
Jones’s role is to manage day-to-day operations and act in collaboration with the board of directors to ensure the sustainability and viability of the home. He also monitors and directs his six-person staff under the guidelines of the PA Department of Health to ensure the safety, care, and well-being of the residents.
Prior to this work at the House of Care, Jones served as mission associate of the State College Presbyterian Church. He was the founding director of the area’s Church World Service Refugee Resettlement Program and has served congregations in Florida, Virginia, Illinois, and North Carolina as a minister, and has experience as a prison chaplain.
Born and raised in rural southwest Virginia, he earned an undergraduate degree in animal science/livestock management from North Carolina State University in 1975. He later received a master of divinity degree with a peace studies emphasis from Bethany Theological Seminary in Oak Brook, Illinois, and began his career in ministry.
In 2009, he moved to Pennsylvania where his wife of almost 10 years, Jill Loomis, is a clinical social worker with a private practice in State College.
Town&Gown founder Mimi Barash Coppersmith sat down with Jones at Harrison’s Wine Grill in State College to discuss what services are offered at the House of Care and who it serves, how readers can help make financial donations to support the organization, and the overwhelming need for more personal-care facilities.
Mimi: Well, Phil, welcome. I am familiar with House of Care in a general way, but if someone asked me exactly what the details of your mission are, I wouldn’t be able to tell them, so I am going to guess that a lot of our readers will enjoy learning about the remarkable work that you do. Tell me how you got involved in it?
Phil: Thank you for inviting me to be part of this. I have a background in nonprofit and pastoral ministry. I have done a lot of things in my lifetime, but most have been in the social services area. I have had an opportunity to deal hands-on with people that probably just need a helping hand. The House of Care is certainly a place we can do that. That is why I feel comfortable there.
Mimi: It’s a pretty small place. You have five residents?
Phil: That is correct. That is one of the important things about the House of Care — we become a home. Our slogan is a personal-care home with a heart. We live in a residential home, right along Beaver Avenue.
Mimi: Describe the people who live there.
Phil: We are a personal-care home. I don’t think there is another home in Pennsylvania that serves the unique clients that we do. Folks come to us because they have no family support or if they do, it’s very minimal. The family isn’t able to provide the care they need. They come to us because they have no finances. They may have a very small pension check or Social Security check. Other than that, they have no other income and likely have had limited income throughout their lives.
Mimi: And they are unable to work?
Phil: Right. And that is the third piece. They have some type of debilitating illness, either physical or mental. They cannot survive independently on their own. We are different from a nursing home, though, because all of our residents are able to be mobile and function pretty well. They don’t need nursing care, they just need someone there to make sure they take their medication and get them to the doctors. We provide a place for them to live. We provide all the furnishing for their bedroom. Each one of them has their own private bedroom. We provide all the meals that they need, the food to cook those meals. Take them to their doctors’ appointments. We provide transportation wherever they need to go. So we become their family.
Mimi: They are your children.
Phil: They are in a lot of ways, yeah!
Mimi: Just how sick are they?
Phil: House of Care started in 2000. It was actually a group of women in State College who decided to start a house to provide hospice for AIDS patients. We really, for the first few years of operations, did a lot of hospice care with AIDS patients, but we evolved from that because of advances in medical technologies and medications, there is not a need to keep the beds filled. So now we provide care for folks who have all types of debilitating illnesses, from mental health to one client who has renal failure. He has dialysis three days a week. We take him to the dialysis center and provide the care for him at the home.
Mimi: Now they have Medicaid.
Phil: They do. We do everything for our residents, except care for their finances. We don’t do that. Through their Medicaid and Social Security, their bills and things are taken care of. We don’t get involved in their personal finances. If there is a resident who needs some finance management, we turn to other organizations, such as Interfaith Human Services. The illnesses range from resident to resident.
Mimi: Are they related to addiction in many cases?
Phil: Not always. In fact, that is an exception. We have had that in our home where some individuals did have some addiction issues and damaged their mental health. Normally, our residents, when they come to us — the youngest having been in their 40s — they come to us when they have illnesses that have evolved over the years and they can’t take care of themselves anymore. In a lot of cases, because they can’t afford the care they need they haven’t been taking medications that they need or going to their doctors on a regular basis. That is why we provide a stable environment where they can get back on their feet, and whatever problems or illnesses they do have, we can stabilize it. And we have remarkable success helping individuals coming to our home that really were struggling, both physically and mentally.
Mimi: Do they ever get out of the home?
Phil: They do. Occasionally they will. One woman had severe diabetes, and she did get help she needed for that in our home. Once we got her stabilized and her health was better and she was able to care and manage all of that by herself. Her family could then take her home and manage her care by themselves.
Mimi: Are they rare?
Phil: They are rare. Although we don’t provide a lot of hospice care, over the last six to eight years, we had three residents who had been at the home for five to eight years and passed away.
Mimi: There are some homeless people on the streets of State College. Where do they live?
Phil: That is a good question. House of Care is not a shelter for the homeless. I have worked with a community program that helps with the homeless called Out of the Cold, and we get individuals who get into that program under the same reason they would come to us. We only have five beds — we can’t take them in. But many of the same issues are happening there. Mental-health patients who are released from the hospital and other facilities and they have absolutely nowhere to go, so they end up living on the streets. That’s why six or eight years ago Centre County started Out of the Cold, which is an emergency homeless shelter where there are 13 partner congregations that host the homeless in their facility, two weeks at a time, from October through May. They move from church to church. One church would host them for two weeks and then another church will host them for two weeks throughout the winter. So they can get out of the cold, literally. That started because there was a gentleman in Bellefonte who froze to death on the streets, and that got the faith communities and social service agencies’ attention.
Mimi: Each church pays for its own expense?
Phil: Yes. We provide a meal for them when they come in at 9. We provide volunteers to stay with them overnight. We also provide a quick breakfast for them, and then they will be on their way at 7 in the morning. It’s a struggle because it is an emergency shelter, so we can’t provide everything.
Mimi: Every day in the week for two weeks!
Phil: Every day in the week for two weeks from October through May. Tying it into House of Care is really hard for me because many individuals desperately just need what we can do at the House of Care. They need somebody to help them get back on their medications, on their feet, and get them to the doctors. If these individuals have that kind of support, they could cope on their own because often they are younger persons.
Mimi: Tell me how you manage financials.
Phil: We have a really small budget, $180,000 a year. Some people may disagree when I say this, but I consider this to be the most important $180,000 that comes through Centre County — for we are providing these residents help that they could not get anywhere else. If they didn’t have the House of Care, they could be homeless or they could be in a nursing home where they don’t necessarily need that kind of support, which costs a lot more taxpayer money in the long run. So it is really important for us to have the support for the work that we do. We receive funding from the United Way and Community Development Block Grant. Those are the two checks I can count on every month. We also receive generous support from other local foundations and grants. We generate a modest amount from our resident fees. We receive their Social Security check; we are mandated to give them $85 dollars for spending money. It costs us a little over $100 per day to provide the services, which includes 24/7 staff, housing, food, and transportation.
Mimi: I don’t see how you manage on $180,000 a year!
Phil: It is hard. We have six full-time employees and then myself, as executive director. We struggle with that. We do own the house. Initial funding came through the Community Development Grant — it paid for a lot of that.
Mimi: Where is your greatest financial need?
Phil: It’s day-to-day operations. There are grants out there that we are constantly looking for, but the grants are always tied to some specific projects. I have no problem getting a grant to put a new roof on the house, but it is hard to get a grant to get $200 dollars every week for groceries. It’s really hard to find a grant to pay the salary for my staff, which is minimal at $9 an hour. So I have to turn to public.
Mimi: And what part of your budget does the public currently supply?
Phil: A little over 50 percent when you take out some of the grants and United Way funding. That leaves about 60 percent of our budget, or about $90,000 to $100,000, we have to raise through fund-raising and public donations. We have a core group of people that give generously every year, but it is a constant challenge to find folks to add to that. Centre Gives is operated by Centre Foundation and is an online tool that we have been using, and it has been growing. We got about $25,000 through that and matching dollars that came through normal Centre Foundation grants.
Mimi: What is the cost of running the place per day?
Phil: It is a little over $120 per day per resident. Our residents pay $30 per day. That is running out of a deficit of $450 per day where we were starting from. Every time I go to the board of directors meeting, I present a financial statement and I put a little note down on the bottom that we run at a deficit of $9,000 per month. Those are the dollars that I can’t identify where they are going to come from.
Mimi: So about $500 would pay for all five people. Maybe some of our readers, particularly this time of year, will count their blessings, and count how many people they want to take care of for how many days. What you do is just amazing.
Phil: One thing I say to people is for $200 a week you can feed all five of our residents for that week. There are lots of ways you can help.
Mimi: I imagine that there is probably a demand that you can’t fill. Do you fill the demand that exists?
Phil: Absolutely not. I quit keeping a waiting list for residents because, with the nature of our residents, you don’t know how long they are going to be staying there. Someone might call on a Monday and say, “I really need a place for my dad to go; we can’t care for him anymore. He has to leave Centre Crest next week, and I don’t know what I am going to do with him.” I might have to say, “I don’t have room for him today.” My dream is to have three or four of these homes. I really like the feel of a personal-care home, a residential feeling. I don’t want a long hallway with rooms down the side.
Mimi: We talked about the area of mental health and the absence of service for patients with severe mental health. One of your patients currently has mental issues.
Phil: Currently at the home, we have five residents and three have mental health as their major diagnoses. There are usually other things involved. But there are so many more out there. I am sure that some of your readers have a mom or dad or many even an older child who has mental-health concerns. How do we care for them? How do we ensure that they have a safe environment to live in when we pass away? So it is critical to have more of these types of residences to care for them.
Mimi: Hospitals in Altoona and Huntingdon provide bus tickets for mentally ill people, discharged patients to come to State College.
Phil: I will give you a quick story. One of our residents passed away in February, so we had an opening, so we got out the word with social service agencies immediately. We had four or five people who were prospective candidates for our care. I wanted to do a personal interview. One of those individuals was at Mount Nittany Hospital and I went and did an interview, and I determined that her larger challenge was mental health. I had another interview at Centre Crest. She was in a nursing facility but no longer needed that level of care, she had to go somewhere and had no place to go. I did that interview and decided her biggest challenge was physical. So I had to choose between a mental-health case and a physical case. I decided, based on the nature and makeup of our home at the time, that I would take the one with the physical challenges. I did the interview at the hospital with the person with the mental challenge on a Monday and found out on Tuesday that she had been released into our area emergency homeless shelter because she had nowhere else to go. That kind of thing breaks my heart.
Mimi: I must tell our readers that at different points in this conversation you get tears in your eyes. This last one, I saw those tears forming.
Phil: People who know me will not be surprised by that.
Mimi: I have to say that you are doing God’s work.
Phil: Well, in so many ways it is a ministry.
Mimi: What didn’t I ask you that you would like me to ask?
Phil: We had talked about this earlier, and I do want to emphasize that we have support from many within the faith community, but we always need more. There are three marvelous congregations who provide very generous support. They are the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, they provide financial support as well as wonderful volunteers; State College Presbyterian Church; and University Baptist & Brethren Church. All three are strong supporters. I would love to visit other congregations and faith communities to tell our story because, as I tell my board of directors every meeting, all we need to do is share our story — and that’s what we are doing in Town&Gown today — and the dollars will come.
Mimi: That is a good note in which to close this interview. I know that some of our readers will respond. I know from experience there has been some genuine generosity that follow some of these interviews about the remarkable social agencies that people like you run. Thank you for your great work.
Phil: Thank you for the opportunity to share.
For more information about House of Care, visit houseofcare.org.
