Kate Fay is the executive director for One House at a Time (OHAAT) located in Huntington Valley, a nonprofit organization that was originally founded by volunteers who primarily delivered furniture donations to families that were victims of natural disasters and were referred to them by The Red Cross.
However, in 2011 there was a shift in the organization’s main mission. The board of directors at the time realized rather than duplicating the efforts of local furniture donation banks in the area, they could better serve the community by focusing on the health of a group that was getting overlooked: sleep and children.
While families were grateful for their new dining sets, sofas, and furniture, the organization realized that they were still leaving children with no beds to sleep on the floor. Beds were so scarcely donated due to hygiene concerns, but the organization knew that something had to be done.
And thus, the mattress program was born.
At the beginning of the mattress program, they delivered upwards of 250 beds a year. But in 2023, the program had a substantial growth, delivering upwards of 2,107 beds to children in the area.
The busiest times are through the months of September to December and already this year they have delivered 2,002 beds.
To combat the issue of bed bugs, the packages curated for the children are as follows: a stainless-steel bed frame that supports up to 1,200 lbs., and a memory foam mattress which are considered bed bug resistant. Additionally, the packages include a personalized “bedtime bag” which includes a new blanket, pillow, sheet set, a handmade quilt, bed time books, a stuffed animal, a toothbrush, and healthy sleep information that was put together by one of the organizations board members who is a pediatric sleep specialist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).
How is your organization benefiting your community?
The essence of the program is to provide good quality items that are going to give the child a sense of pride because they are good quality items. But also, that these items are going to last a long time throughout their childhood, hopefully. We don’t just want to provide Band-Aids or ‘quick fix’ solutions, we want to provide long-lasting items that means that this issue is hopefully resolved for the duration of their childhood and beyond.
About 73% of our deliveries are made in the city. We know that this is where the greatest concentration of need is. Part of that is because we are relatively well established by some of our referral partners in the city and they know about us. There are a huge number of families that need support in the city, and families who are really struggling. That is reflected in our numbers of deliveries.
We serve children from the ages of two to 20, so our packages can be curated and personalized for a very little one, all the way through to a 20-year-old and sometimes beyond if there are kids who are transitioning out of the care system and still need a helping hand, we are still of course going to help. It is just a broad guideline of that age group of two to 20.
I think that personally and professionally, we know the impact that poor sleep has on us as we try and move through our day. There is not a single system in our body that is affected by the effects of poor sleep and conversely the benefits of a good night’s sleep. We know that for children, particularly having a good night’s sleep helps with all sorts of health issues whether it is cardiac issues or around diabetes or general growth and development, but even cognitive development our ability to manage our emotions and focus the following day is all effecting by a goodnight sleep. We have been fortunate to work with CHOP on some of their sleep studies that they have done to measure the impact that our program has on families and specifically children pre- and post-delivery. We now know that minimally once children receive a bed from us they are getting routinely a extra 30 minutes of sleep every single night. Cumulatively, this has a huge benefit in terms of their ability to wake up the following morning on time to go to school, but also be ready to focus and learn and engage with their peers in a way that feels good; rather than the range of issues we can come up against if we had a poor night’s sleep.
We have also received feedback from parents through the program that it impacts their sleep to because once the kids are sleeping well they can sleep better too. Just the general stress in the household is reduced once everyone is sleeping better. I think for a lot of parents, it is a huge worry. If families are struggling financially, and don’t have the resources to go out and buy a new bed for their child because it is a very expensive item to buy, especially if there are numerous children in the household, just having the burden of that worry removed as well is huge. It is impactful towards the stress that we can hopefully remove that one worry from their list of things to worry about. It is just one less thing to do. As I said, it takes care of it in a long-term way, it isn’t just an air mattress that will serve the family for a couple of weeks at best.
How did you start in this organization? How do you think something like this organization would have impacted you?
For me personally, I was once in college, and it did a number on me so once I found the world of non-profits I was able to move in very easily. It spoke to my interest in social justice and ultimately wanting to help people. And so the early part of my career I worked in the nonprofit housing in the U.K., and then we moved to the U.S. in 2015. When I was able to move and find a job here, beds for kids was looking for staff, seamlessly , it arose that they were looking for a new executive director at that time so I was able to move into this role and it really just couldn’t of been more perfect in terms of tying up my previous experience with nonprofits elsewhere, but also in that time, I became a mom, and I began to see the benefits of having a goodnight’s sleep and what that did to both me and my children when they were able to sleep well. It feels like something that is very very impactful, and what I love about this program is that we know that we are offering tangible help to this family from the moment at which we deliver.
So it is a very satisfying feeling to know that, today for instance, we are going out and delivering to sixteen children who will have a warm and comfortable bed to sleep in tonight that they didn’t have last night. To me, that helps and gives extensive satisfaction too. I think that as a child I recognized the privilege that I had in terms of never having to worry about whether there was a bed for me to sleep in, and I can recognize that it is a huge privilege and huge advantage that many children in the community don’t have and anything we can do to help that to me seems like a very important role in terms of the opportunities we are offering our children to become their best selves and thrive.
Do you have volunteers or paid staff who run the organization/stores?
In terms of our paid staff, there is myself, and we have a full-time referral coordinator, and a program officer, so both of those staffs spend the majority of their time working with both families and referral partners to schedule the expected deliveries. That is the majority of what we do so it is very important to us and they are pivotal in making sure the program is delivered effectively and efficiently. In addition to those roles, we also have a part-time operation involved volunteer coordinator, Sara, who does that role coordinates both our inventory and warehouse in making sure we have enough beds ad associated pieces so that the pillows and the sheet sets, etc. are there. She also coordinates our volunteer opportunities. We are very fortunate to have a team of over 400 volunteers who through the course of the year, will come and help us with a range of activities from going out on deliveries to coming into the warehouse to sort donations. We often have groups of volunteers that could be anyone from a Girl Scout Troop, to sometimes a corporate group of employees who are looking to do a day of service, or even groups of friends. In the summers we get groups of students coming from break who want to volunteer.
Typically, groups come into the warehouse are between 10-15 people, sometimes more, and they work through anything we have to do in the warehouse. Like sorting incoming donations, quality checking, packing bedtime bags, these are big volunteer jobs just to make sure the child has, and it is packed to be very detailed driven volunteer job. It really suits people who enjoy putting together a bundle of items for a child that will hopefully when they open they will feel like somebody put a lot of thought into this, and cares about what I like. As I said, we have a large number of volunteers that help us in the warehouse. We also have some volunteer truck drivers who drive our delivery trucks, in addition to the prepaid drivers we have. Our volunteer truck drivers go out on additional delivery drives for us, and they volunteer on the weekend and do delivery rounds on Saturday.
Sometimes, volunteers will go out with us on a delivery. The beds and bed frames are pretty heavy so having many hands can be very helpful when getting all of the beds together.
Where do you get your donations from? What determines whether you can take the donation or not? What donations do you accept?
The mattresses we get are all new. We work with a national non-profit called Good 360, and they help to match donated items from the companies to non-profits who can use them. We purchase a lot of mattresses through Good 360, and they are typically mattresses that have been donated by Tempura-Pedic which are really good quality mattresses. It is a real treat to be able to deliver those to families. In addition to that, we purchase memory foam mattress pads from a US supplier in bulk. The books we get are generally donated items. Typically, they are gently used, so we have a lot of volunteers that do quality checks and sort for age to put them in categories that will be in an appropriate reading age and also interest level for the kids we are serving.
What is the importance of buying new mattresses instead of used ones for your organization?
For us, since we need to guarantee the hygiene of the mattresses and the quality so the components of everything are always clean. For us, the used components are the times when people will donate gently used bedding like blankets, sheets, and we will make sure they have been washed at high heat and dried at high heat to make sure they are clean and sanitary. Our books and stuffed animals, likewise, are often gently used.
I think that is a really great pipeline in terms of being able to have a really good number of those items to be able to deliver, but we need to make sure that they are all good quality. That is such a huge part of what the volunteers do for us: making sure that we are meeting our quality standards. It is a lovely way to bring back into use many stuffed animals. Often, we will get donations of stuffed animals, and parents will say ‘These have barely been played with at all’ and so just being able to offer these stuffed animals that are in fantastic condition. It is great to be able to give those stuffed animals a new home, give books a new home once kids have grown out of them and make sure they are still being used and read, so that is really fantastic.
Could you talk a little about the registration process for the program?
Families are typically referred to us by a referral partner. Families can’t self-refer. However, because we serve two to 20, the large majority of kids we serve are of school-going age. Very often, if a family isn’t working with a agency who can refer them then we will encourage them to talk to schools so that a school can refer them to the program.
Alternatively, a after school program or a local church group or pediatricians’ office can also make a referral to the program. If the child isn’t of school-going age, they are younger, any kind of early year provider can make a referral too. That would be where access to a pediatrician or a health provider could be helpful in providing that referral. There are also a range of community organizations, lots of the organizations that help are for basic needs. Lots of food cupboards, local organizations that provide anything from occupational therapy, regular therapy to just any support can also be a referral partner for our program.
It is really just about trying to troubleshoot people when they call us, and they are working with a partner, we just try to figure out what might be the best route for them to get a referral to our program.
That is our big challenge really. We just try and get out into the community as much as we can. Our challenge really is making sure we are aware of things going on in the community where there is an opportunity to share information about the program. Just making sure that we have staff or volunteers who can be there to represent the program too because we are so small. Sometimes it’s just challenging to manage those resources and trying to get coverage in all the places we need to be. I think we are sort of rapidly outgrowing our space, we would probably love to have a bigger warehouse and a bigger office and all of those things. Obviously, our biggest challenge is always funding. We do not receive any funding from the state or federal funding, so it really is all on our shoulders to make sure we are raising money to continue to provide the program. We rely heavily on grants from foundations, but also individual donations in order to be able to keep the program afloat. That is really the on-going challenge as it is for all non-profits.
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