Outreach

POWER advocates do outreach whenever possible to welfare offices, food banks and other places low-income people congregate to bringing useful information about your rights and about POWER as a resource. In Olympia we bring coffee donated by Olympia Coffee Roasters and pastries donated by the San Francisco Street Bakery and the Bread Peddler to make the long waits a little more pleasant.

We try to do weekly outreach in Olympia, try to get into rural areas, and provide support to POWER members to do outreach in their communities. Please let us know if you would like to do outreach, which can be as simple as taking POWER brochures and fliers when you go to your local welfare office, WIC, WorkSource, etc.

We provide volunteers, interns and staff with mileage or fare reimbursement to and from outreach. Outreach is a great way to get involved with the community and educate people.

Rural County Needs Assessment

In May 2014, POWER received a grant from the Thurston County Home Consortium to assess the social service needs of rural Thurston County. The purpose of the project was to pinpoint gaps in service, identify new and future service needs, define best practices for serving rural areas, and make recommendations regarding the needs of low-income, at-risk and homeless individuals and families in the County’s rural areas.

We proposed that 2/3rds of the people we interviewed in this 2-month outreach project would be low-income people using services in rural Thurston County, (the primary experts on poverty). The remaining interviewees would be secondard poverty experts, including service providers, teachers, religious leaders and elected officials. We presented our report on July 14th to a grateful consortium who found our report very useful.

You can find our Rural Thurston County Needs Assessment at:

Rural%20Thurston%20County%20Needs%20Assessment%202014%20FINAL.pdf