Oldham, SD

The Horizons Committees have been busy building partnerships and involving many groups and organizations in our efforts to address poverty in Oldham. The City council was asked to pay for half of the cost of the citywide clean up on May 2 which they agreed to do. The county commission has deeded property over to OAIC for the housing committee, the school district is allowing the use of the school gym for meetings and allowing internet to be installed for the Horizons group. Alliance Communications is installing and providing free high speed internet into the school gym for Horizons. Horizons Health Care Systems will be partnering with the community for health screenings and health education. Horizons and ORR students partnered together to have a food drive for the food bank. That involves many groups in the community including the churches and some other groups that support the food bank. Many other possibilities are being explored. 

Representatives of the various committees met in the regular monthly meeting with “Coach Martha” to report progress on the work over the past month. The convenience store committee met and discussed numerous aspects of developing a plan to get a new convenience store in Oldham. They have been investigating possible locations for a store. Several committee members went to the economic and entrepreneurship meeting in Forestburg. Several members of the committee also visited a couple of convenience stores and visited with the owners and managers of the stores to learn what has worked and not worked for the businesses. The housing committee is busy gathering information on possible tax delinquent property to ask the county to deed the property over to the OAIC to demolish the buildings and make the lots available for anyone who wants to build a new house. They have bids for demolishing two buildings and will be continuing with the efforts to improve housing in the community.

The Oldham Horizons Steering committee and Horizons Health Care Systems based in Howard SD have initiated a cooperative effort to educate the community on services available. How and when this will be done is still in the very early stages of discussion. These could include free health screenings for blood pressure, diabetes education and getting information to community members about the sliding scale charges that Horizon Health Care Systems provides so low income persons can afford health care. Oldham Horizons is looking forward to this new partnership and the possibilities for increased health awareness in the community.

The Horizons steering committee contacted the local ISP provider for Oldham and asked for help with making blogging access available to those in the community that don’t have access to the internet or have dial up internet. Alliance Communications has agreed to install high speed internet access into the school gymnasium in Oldham and will provide the internet service free to the Horizons committees. The installation will be done in the next couple of weeks and the group is looking for computers and we will hopefully get started with blog nights and updates for the Oldham website.

Oldham made the effort to apply for the Tradition of Caring Grant offered by Kelo-Land Television. Kelo-Land was offering $150,000 in grants in the form of public service announcements. Oldham unfortunately was not chosen for the grant but as recognition to the community for our efforts, Kelo-Land is adding a link to the Oldham website on their website. This will be an incentive for us to keep it updated and add to the information available as the Kelo-Land site is the most visited website in the region. Maybe not as good as a PSA but certainly an opportunity for Oldham to capitalize on our efforts.

Sunday January 20, the Oldham Horizons committees came together to get their committees organized and get down to the business of accomplishing the goals set out in our Strategic Plan. Almost 30 people sat down in four different committees and began to map out their ideas and plans for reaching the goals set for each of the committees. Each committee organized themselves with a contact person or chairman and a recorder so they can keep track of their progress and report back to Horizons and the OAIC. It was also announced that the Tour de Kota bike tour is going to make a return visit to Oldham for the second year in a row.

Monday January 28 the Oldham Area Improvment Corporation received certification of tax exempt non-profit status from the IRS. This status will be in effect from August 2007 until August 2008 when a follow-up report will be requested for the organization’s activities and then permanent status will be granted. It is a long process and many hours and pages of forms to fill out and questions to be answered. This status allows for tax deductible donations and contributions and opens the doors to many more grants from foundations and other entities. This has been a huge step forward in our efforts to revitalize or tiny community.

The Oldham Food Pantry is operated by volunteers within the community and serve the Oldham and Ramona area. They have had the pantry in operation for many years and use the Oldham Lutheran Church for the collection and storage of the pantry items. Many thanks are to be given for the volunteers operating the pantry. They do this with out fanfare and have often not really even publicized their efforts for the sake of the privacy of the people they help. We do need to recognize their efforts and support the work being done by these wonderful volunteers. The following was given to me by one of the volunteers so we could post it on the blog.

” The Oldham Community Food Pantry delivered “Thanksgiving Baskets”  to 15 families the week before Thanksgiving.  These baskets included a turkey or hamburger plus sausage, potatoes, stuffing, peanut butter along with various other food items, non food items such as toilet paper, tooth paste & brushes, shampoo, all types of soaps plus many other items!  “Care Packages” were given to 2 households also.

      “Christmas Boxes” were also made up by the  Oldham Community Food Pantry and delivered before Christmas week to 17 households.   These boxes contained  among many other food items a ham and apples.  Non-food items were again included in the boxes and diapers were included in this outreach.  JC Penny’s Gift Certificates in the amount of $10.00  were given out to 21 children.”