Endowment fund would ensure a sustainable budget for Warming House
Hiryu “Mike” Waseda, ’21, ’23 (left), led the day-to-day Warming House operations during the pandemic as an undergraduate student. He has since joined the university staff and now serves as assistant director of the Franciscan Center for Social Concern.
By Tom Donahue
Crunch the Warming House numbers and it reveals a growing need for the program’s daily work to alleviate hunger and food insecurity in the Olean community.
The student-run soup kitchen served 5,922 meals in 2019. Three years later, that number more than doubled, to 13,306. And during 2023, the Warming House served more than 23,000 meals.
As the need increases, so does the strain on a Warming House budget dependent solely on grants and donations.
Now, a new endowment fund established by the Office of University Advancement at SBU will help ensure that as long as there are people in need of food and friendship, the Warming House doors will be open.
The Endowment for Warming House Sustainability aims to raise $1 million, which would generate approximately $50,000 in yearly operating funds and provide some much-needed fiscal stability.
“I realized shortly after I arrived on campus five years ago that if all our funding dried up, we didn’t have enough money in our reserves to keep the Warming House going for one year,” said Alice Miller Nation, director of University Ministries. Among her duties is oversight of the Franciscan Center for Social Concern (FCSC) and its student-run outreach programs, including the Warming House.
The Warming House’s annual budget is approximately $150,000, but the funding stream is uncertain from year to year. Grants expire and donations fluctuate, making balancing the books a matter of “thoughtful and intentional budgeting and spending,” Miller Nation said.
In recent years, the university’s annual Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign has benefitted FCSC, providing funds to the Warming House and other programs. “Giving Tuesday has been a game-changer for us,” Miller Nation said, but, she added, it does not eliminate the need to raise substantial additional Warming House funding.
And while Warming House revenues have remained essentially the same over the past five years, costs have not, said Hiryu “Mike” Waseda, ’21, ’23, FCSC assistant director, who runs day-to-day operations at the Warming House.
“We’re serving more and more guests, so we needed to hire more student coordinators,” Waseda said. “Wages are going up and food is getting more expensive, so it’s hard to get what we used to get for the same amount of money.”
Donations of food and money, and help from volunteer workers remain the firmest pillar supporting Warming House operations, Waseda said. “Food donations are huge. We’re able to survive because we have such a strong relationship with St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Buffalo, which donates a truckload of food every year, and with so many individual donors.”
So the Warming House is staying afloat, but it’s treading water in an uncertain fiscal sea.
“It’s working for us right now, but we want to make sure it’s working 10 years from now, 15 years from now,” Miller Nation said, adding the Endowment for Warming House Sustainability will do just that.
“We want to have systems in place that are going to offer consistency and stability into the future. I just want to take the edge off, to make sure that the Warming House is here for 50 more years.”
To donate to the Endowment for Warming House Sustainability, go to www.sbu.edu/donate and search for the endowment in the drop-down menu of donate options.
Tom Donahue, ’76, is director of print and electronic publications at St. Bonaventure.
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