Pillsbury House serves
vital needs of area residents

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

Pillsbury house supporters - (l to r) Roxanne Jan Horn, Mary Whitney, Syretha Bounds, Jessica Prendergast, Amelia Grieu, Robin Draper

Mary Whitney's telephone is always ringing. One recent Wednesday night at the Pillsbury House at 35th Street and Chicago Avenue, while surrounded by a close group of women who have dubbed themselves "Sisters at the Table," Whitney's cell phone started to ring—again. Whitney is a busy woman committed to her work at Pillsbury House, which provides important services for area residents.

The programs available at Pillsbury House range from early education childcare and after-school and summer youth programs, to home buying, tax preparation, computer, family health education, loan and health insurance enrollment assistance, as well as a Family Advocate Network System (FANS). The programs connect hundreds of metro residents to help that is sorely needed, and are all funded by outside public and private subsidies that have become scarcer than ever.

And as funding sources dry up, the needs have increased. Only this month, a sexually transmitted disease counseling program at the Pillsbury House will begin testing applicants for HIV infection. This year enrollment in the House's early education childcare program could not be filled due to shortfalls in scholarship money available from the county.

"The most challenging part of my job is helping families who can't afford early education for their children," said Jessica Prendergast, Pillsbury House's Early Childhood Coordinator, who currently oversees 55 toddlers, preschool and school-age students at two different facilities, "We've estimated that it takes $7,000 to take a single child through early education from the time they're a toddler to school age," she said.

Even by making the most of participant involvement and equity in programs likes FANS, where last year 15 high school age students received .about $30,000 in educational grants by earning volunteer points, securing funding calls upon the creativity of over a dozen full-time Pillsbury House staffers (with another 10 working in the Pillsbury Theater). A Community Barter Network, which served some 1,200 people last year, was created so neighborhood participants can exchange services. In 2006 local residents earned nearly 450 credits at the Time Dollar Store where volunteer hours are traded for household goods.
Connecting dollars to filling community needs has taken on a necessary grassroots character.

Whitney has found this to be especially true for the organization she founded for women who are victims of domestic violence, Women Planting Seeds.

"It brought tears to my eyes," Whitney recalled, "when one of them looked across the table at me and said; 'Now you are a part of the grass roots.'"

Since that time she's had an entire education about what it means to attract the money she needs to nurture the seeds she has sown.

"When you're applying for these grants, you can't just say, 'This money's for me and this is what I want to do,'" she said. "You need to show them that you have an organization and these are the kind of results you've gotten with it."

Women Planting Seeds received its first $2,500 grant from the St. Paul Foundation in 2005 and in 2006 was awarded $10,000 from the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches and another $9,000 from the Bremer Foundation. The organization was nominated for a city Ninth Ward Award in 2006, for its work in service to the community. Before that time the funds it took to help the people she wanted to help came from Whitney's own pocket-book.

Whitney, whose formal training includes classes at local technical schools and weeks at a police academy, credits her gift for helping others to her personal experience of violence. She learned the ugly truths of domestic abuse at the young age six years old.

"And when I read about these things in books," she said, "I look at this word or that word and 1 think, 'None of this can really compare to what you feel in your heart when you listen to someone who's been there.'"

Syretha Bounds agrees. Bounds, a north metro resident who has been at the receiving end of violent domestic abuse and who has recently graduated from self-help classes in which Whitney helped her enroll, said that being allowed to freely express her id t in programs like the one at Pillsbury House has made all the difference.

"The mosi important thing to me is to be ahlt to say whatever 1 want (o say however I w ant to say it," she said.

"Sisters at the Table" meets every other Wednesday at the PiUsbury House with 6 to 10 members saying whatever they wan) to say however they want to say it about living with violence in their own homes. Whitney, its founder, who plans to publish a memoir soon detailing her personal experience with violence and the experience of healing its effects, can be reached at, sunny@presssenter.com.

"I don't want my phone to stop ringing anytime soon," she said.
Mdiv information vn the Pilhlmry House fitiii its community programs can be found on its website, puc-mn.org .