Annual Report

ocs building “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” —Charles Darwin

This year, with unemployment and housing foreclosures at long-time highs, Oberlin Community Services has had to be collaborative in our strategies and innovative in our thinking in order to help more people with fewer resources. As a community center that strives to meet the needs of southern Lorain County’s diverse population, we have always partnered with a variety of
people and institutions to serve the many needs that surround us. This year we have extended our collaborations even further.

When Lorain County Transit (LCT) was forced by budget cuts to eliminate all routes in the southern part of the county last winter, several community organizations joined together to respond. The City of Oberlin, Lorain Metropolitan Housing and OCS collectively contracted with LCT to provide a Community Connector service two days a week, beginning in July. This service allowed Oberlin residents to schedule rides to area medical and social-service appointments and to continue shopping in the area. We continue to look for longer-term solutions, but in the interim we have been able to help the most vulnerable in our community regain at least some access to local resources.

OCS also was able to offer community members free tax assistance, saving them a substantial amount of money. Claudine Brenner, a VISTA volunteer working as a community trainer for the Ohio Benefit Bank (a program of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks), helped us recruit and train Oberlin College students to serve as volunteer tax counselors. They met at OCS with community members throughout the spring, and through their efforts, 63 community members saved a total of nearly $100,000 through tax filings alone: $76,540 in refunds and $23,253 in earned-income tax credits. Both Claudine and the student volunteers came to us with the help of Oberlin College’s Bonner Center for Service and Learning—another partnership that brought significant benefit to the community.

Other, smaller-scale collaborative efforts helped us connect community resources with community needs this year. We were able to offer twelve of our clients refurbished bicycles, along with helmets and locks, by working with the City of Oberlin and the Oberlin College Bike Co-op. The City was holding a number of bikes in storage. They gave a dozen of them to the Bike Co-op over the summer to repair and refurbish, after which the Co-op presented them to OCS to distribute to clients for their transportation and exercise needs. As a finishing touch, a grant from the Oberlin College Student Philanthropic Club enabled us to purchase a lock and helmet to give out with each bike.

Our core work in emergency assistance and math tutoring has continued, of course, supported by our funders, which include the Community Giving Campaign of Oberlin, the Nord Family Foundation, The Community Foundation of Lorain County, Nordson Corporation Foundation, and our many individual donors. Second Harvest Food Bank continues to support us by providing most of the food for our pantry. And Oberlin College
again was a significant partner in many ways; for example, we employed more than 30 Oberlin College student workers and tutors through the federal work-study program. We also were supported by 259 volunteers over the course of the year.

Overall it has been a very rough year, one in which our community, like many others, was battered by the poor economy. The projects I described above show just a few of the ways in which we were able to meet the needs of community members by pooling our resources with those of other groups—to “collaborate and improvise,” as Darwin wrote, in order to prevail. Next year will undoubtedly bring new challenges. I am confident that, thanks to all of our partners, friends, and supporters in the community, we will continue to prevail.

--Linda Arbogast, Executive Director