Giving Tuesday features fundraising to expand Yaphank veterans shelter

For a Yaphank shelter helping homeless veterans get back on their feet, Giving Tuesday this year is all about giving them a little more elbow room.

The 23-bed county-funded shelter known as The Veterans Place has been run out of a converted motel on Mill Road since 1999. The shelter’s staff began raising money a year ago to expand and renovate its cramped dining, kitchen, reception and staff sleeping areas, and to install an elevator.

There were boxes of pasta overflowing from shelves, pots and pans stacked up in a corner and no quiet space for new residents to sit when they arrive. So shelter director Wilkens Young said adding more room was an obvious choice for the facility's next capital investment. The facility is usually between 90 and 95 percent full and often has a waiting list, said Suffolk County United Veterans Director of Development Ruth McDade.

The facility, which takes in homeless veterans but also has spots for nonveterans, is run by United Veterans of Suffolk County, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Association for Mental Health and Wellness, with funding from the Suffolk County Department of Social Services.

The renovation project will take at least $200,000 in cash and in-kind donations. So far, about $62,000 has been raised, McDade said. 

To get closer to that goal, this year the shelter took advantage of Giving Tuesday, an online campaign that started in 2012 as a day for charitable donations after the consumption holidays of Black Friday and Cyber Monday that come after Thanksgiving.

For a week and a half before Tuesday, McDade set out to raise $5,000 toward the renovations. Shelter staff turned to Facebook and its email list, posting pictures with the hashtag #GivingTuesday every day for two weeks, hoping to illustrate the stories of the people who live in, work at and donate to the shelter.

On Tuesday, Air Force veteran Alan Mercado, 61, was preparing to cook halibut fillets for his fellow residents in the shelter’s cramped kitchen. Mercado, who has lived at the shelter since August, walked past a new stove to open overstuffed cabinets and gestured to a pile of pans on a metal shelf.

“Right now [stuff is] being thrown anywhere they can put it,” Mercado said. "There’s a lot of disrepair that needs fixing.”

New clients at The Veterans Place walk in the front door to find a dining room that can be chaotic and full of people. The expansion will mean that men arriving at the shelter, often in distress, will have a quiet office to meet with staff.

“Some people are paranoid schizophrenic, other people ... can’t be in social environments. So we try to rearrange everything so we can make accommodations for those needs, and also for our staff,” Young said.

The Giving Tuesday fundraising started Nov. 16. Pictures of donors, shelter staff and residents all made it onto the Facebook page over the following days. Those included a post about Marcelle Leis, the shelter’s program director, in her Air Force uniform, and a post about the leather-clad members of the Long Island chapter of the Teamster Horsemen Motorcycle Association, whose members occasionally raise money for the shelter.

By Tuesday night, United Veterans of Suffolk County had surpassed its goal for the shelter, raising $5,740.

The Long Island chapter of the Teamster Horsemen motorcycle club donated about $250 toward the Giving Tuesday effort.

Brian Fredrickson, the chapter’s vice president, said the Horsemen support the shelter because the effects of their donations are visible in the lives of the veterans who come to the shelter.

"Actions speak louder than words, and there’s a lot of action going on over there,” he said.