Agency update: Guardian House
When Guardian House received a 2019 High Impact Grant from Impact San Antonio, their focus was on repairing and upgrading their headquarters, a vintage home in the Monte Vista area.
Some of the work, including foundation repair, had already been done when Covid hit. But the pandemic raised questions about whether the headquarters were adequate in an age of social distancing.
Now, the grant has been repurposed to provide for needs highlighted by the pandemic: more bilingual staff and related supplies and equipment. That is much needed because the agency saw an 86 percent increase in client enrollments from 2020 to 2021.
Guardian House serves families by offering counseling, parenting classes and supervised visitations between children and non-custodial parents. When Covid arrived, the need for those services grew, and the nonprofit had to change the way it provided them.
“We started working from home the second week of March 2020,” said Shannon White, Guardian House CEO and Chief Clinical Director. “People had been coming in from all over for visitation, including from other states like California, and we realized it wasn’t practical to have people do that in person. We realized we couldn’t keep people safe from Covid here. Even cleaning supplies were hard to get. Within a month, we had pivoted all of our services online.”
Staff started coming back into the office in October 2020, but that highlighted a new set of issues. The need to follow social distancing protocols became a real problem in the old house and its small rooms, White said.
“We had to limit the number of rooms we use for visitations and consultations, which reduces the number of families we can see,” she said. “Because of the way the house is designed, there were privacy concerns because people are discussing really personal things in counseling sessions.”
Staff discussed possible expansion of the house with a second floor, but ultimately decided to hire a consulting firm to survey the agency’s top donors.
“Their consensus was, ‘We don’t want you in that building anymore.’ We took that back to the board, and it was decided that we needed a new location,” White said.
With that in mind, White and her staff met with Impact SA grant liaisons Holly Ward and Elizabeth Fox to discuss how to use the remaining grant funds for something other than repairs and renovation.
What everyone agreed on was that the remaining grant funding should go to hiring one full-time and one part-time bilingual clinician, plus paying a portion of other clinicians’ salaries and purchasing laptops and other associated supplies to provide mental health services to clients.
Today, about half of Guardian House’s services are provided online, White said. “As we see spikes of Covid, families are less comfortable coming into the office,” she noted.
The agency is seeking a new headquarters but hasn’t found the right building yet, she added.
Although changing the focus of a grant is a rare occurrence for Impact San Antonio, White has high praise for the flexibility of our organization and the two agency liaisons.
“We had really fantastic conversations with the liaisons on what we need,” she said. “Impact SA is a huge supporter of our work. It’s all these amazing women who are uplifting their voice and passion. It’s truly inspiring.”
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