Not everybody is dealt the same hand at birth. For those who have developmental differences or delays, daily life can be a real struggle.
Community Bridges realizes this, and that’s why it works to provide therapy (both physical and occupational) and educational guidance to families and individuals who need it.
It’s a federally mandated program across the country, but it’s not fully federally funded – meaning the government requires it but doesn’t pay for all of it. That means it’s always a challenge for Community Bridges to accomplish what it does on a regular basis, but they always manage to pull it off.
“We bill an insurance company for what they will pay, but we don’t have the parents pay anything,” said Karen Lofgren, interim director of early childhood services. “About 40 to 50 percent of the kids we see live close to or at the poverty line.”
The organization is quite active right here in Concord, too.
“Concord has a huge population of refugees, so we see a lot of refugee families who have just moved to the U.S.,” Lofgren said. “We do have a lot of families who are just scary needy.”
When a family does qualify for services, Community Bridges sets them up with the home-based services of therapy and educational guidance. Staffers at Community Bridges also help direct people toward resources and services they need that can be found elsewhere in the community – this is a significant element of what they do, especially as the holiday season approaches.
“Refugee families, they’ve never had a winter coat in their life, some of them,” Lofgren said. “Some don’t have money to provide boots and jackets for the kids.”
This is where you can come in. Community Bridges is accepting donations of coats/boots for kids ages 18 months to 3 years (but also any age), non-electric toys, food items and gift cards to grocery stores. Community Bridges also encourages people to donate items to Goodwill.
“As a program, we’re moving away from being the ones providing items for families – we want to help families access the resources that are in the community,” Lofgren said. “We want to be able to tell them about churches, food pantries, donation places – but there’s just so few of them now.”
Lofgren pointed out that it seems like there are fewer and fewer resources available to families in need these days – at a time when the need is high.
“This is yearly what we do, although I must say there are fewer and fewer services for families to tap into now,” Lofgren said. “Even the food at pantries over the years has gone down. And a lot of these families don’t drive, so if a pantry isn’t near their house it doesn’t really help.”
Despite the dwindling resources in the community, Community Bridges hasn’t exactly been thrown much of a bone.
“Particularly, for our program needs, we get less and less money every year but we get more kids to serve,” Lofgren said. “We can’t have a wait list, we can’t say no to them. Cobbling together the money to do that is a bit of a challenge, hence our involvement with United Way – they provide us with additional grant money to make it stretch a little further,” she said.
Although finding funding for missions like these will always be a challenge, at least the community has played a big role in the organization’s success so far.
“We just over the last year stopped taking donations all year because we don’t have room in our building anymore,” Lofgren said.
If you would like to donate some items yourself, bring them to the Community Bridges office at 70 Pembroke Road, but just make sure you call first (225-4153) so you can find out if there’s even space to put everything – it’s been filling up pretty fast.
“My office may be filled with stuff,” Lofgren said.
There’s an added emphasis on giving gift cards this year as opposed to physical items (and not just because you can fit a lot more gift cards in an office than jackets).
“It’s more empowering for the family to go to the store and pick things out themselves,” Lofgren said. “It brings about a little bit more of their self-esteem and having a little power in their own lives.”
Don’t worry too much about focusing on very young children – all age groups can be accounted for.
“Birth to 3 is the population we serve, but those kids have siblings, so sometimes it’s hard to give a donation to a family where there’s two other kids in the family,” Lofgren said. In these cases, there will often be donations for all of the kids in the family.
For more information, call the number listed earlier or go to communitybridgesnh.org.
