January 27, 2012

Mountain Peace Shelter signs lease for old Bailey Plaza space

By Tom Locke Editor

On Jan. 27 the Bailey-based Mountain Peace Shelter signed a 53-month lease for 3,790 square feet at the former Bailey Plaza location in downtown Bailey, where it plans to open the Peace Boutique and Retail Shoppe on March 1.

"We need to diversify our funding," said Mountain Peace Shelter Chief Executive Officer Kathy Mastroianni, who explained that there have been recent cuts in grants. "This is one of our ideas to generate anothe stream of funding."

She said the store will carry items such as furniture and clothing that will be "gently used," and it will be "like a resale store with thrift store prices."

"It's going to be very nice, hopefully a pretty elegant environment," she added. It will offer a "boutique enviroment," that will include touches such as coffee and cookies.

The space will also house the administrative offices for the Peace Shelter, which are now located at the same spot as the shelter. The new space will make it so that "people can actually see us" and provide visibility and accessibility for the Peace Shelter without revealing the location of the shelter, where domestic violence victims take refuge.

She expects those new ofices to be manned by a new voluneer coordinator, who the Peace Shelter is in the process of hiring.

Fifty-six resumes have been received, and the announcement of the selection of the volunteer coordinator is targeted for the shelter's volunteer appreciation night on Feb. 12.

Mastroianni said that the contract was signed on Jan. 27 for 53 months with the building owner, Bailey Building LLC, which is owned by Craig Marks, Craig Marks, a Realtor at the Conifer office of Keller-Williams.

The idea of the new store is to man it, at least initially, with unpaid volunteers who will also be learning job skills. Mastroianni said that it will be an employment training center for youth and others, and initially this there will not be any pay for those staffing the store, but outside funding might be sought to help generate some pay. How will the Peace Shelter make money? Mastroianni declined to disclose the lease rate, so it's unlcear what its costs will be in that arena, but in terms of the items themselves and the labor to sell them, it doesn't appear that there will be any costs.

All the items will be donated, she said. Indeed, as a nonprofit, the Peace Shelter is prevented from buying items to sell, she said.

The space will enable the shelter to take advantage of all those donations it is offered all the time. In the past it hasn't been able to take the items because of lack of space.

"Almost every day we turn away donations," said Mastroianni.

She doesn't foresess labor being a problem. "We've got tons of volunteers already," she said.

And competition?

Rather than seeing other mountain-area thrift stores as competitors, Mastroianni foresees cooperating with them in marketing.

"It would be cool to have a little map of thrift stores," she said.

She has already talked to the Intermountain Humane Society, which has a thrift store in Pine Junction. Others that she hasn't talked to include the thrift store run by the Mountain Resource Center in Conifer, the Evergreen Christian Outreach (EChO) resale store in Evergreen, the Evergreen Animal Protective League Thrift Store in Evergreen and the Blue Spruce Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Evergreen.

Mastroianni said she doesn't have any experience with the operations of a thrift store, but some of her staff does.