Oldham, SD

This post has been submitted by Sandy Smith of Oldham for posting to the Community Blog: Please join us to RECOGNIZE, HONOR AND APPRECIATE those who serve our country.

Tuesday April 8th a Military Display was sat up in the lobby of the Oldham Gym…this display was to honor and recognize  “Our Present Military with Oldham Ties”…There were pictures of each of the 21 presently serving our country along with their rank and address!  We as a community know that “FREEDOM  IS  NOT  FREE” and we as the Oldham American Legion Auxiliary thought this would be a way to honor them and to let them know how much we appreciate what they are doing for us by serving our country and to let them know how proud we are of each one of them!!! 

     We know we probably have missed some and we are sorry!  If you have a family member who is serving in a branch of the military please contact Ann Lingbeck or Sandy Smith.

Oldham will be starting to save cans as a way to fund some projects around town. The can bank will be in the old jail. We plan to paint and spruce up the old jail as soon as the weather cooperates. Start saving those cans!

Oldham will be hosting a free City Wide Clean-Up on April 25th. This is intended to be for items that don’t get picked up on regular garbage pickup day. Volunteers will pick up items that are set by the curb. Volunteers are needed. Meet up by the watertower at 5:00 P.M. if you can help.

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 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.”

The information brochure for Oldham is getting translated into Spanish! Chandra Waikel of Wilcox AZ (daughter of Roger and Katie Eide) took the brochure home with them after their summer stay in Oldham. She enlisted the help of some friends and translated the Oldham brochure into Spanish. The next task will be to get the brochure typed up and then get the Spanish language version printed and distributed to the hispanic residents. The brochure gives a short history of Oldham and some of the organizations, services, and businesses serving the community.

The Oldham Community Bulletin Board was a project that came out of study circles and has quickly become a focal point within the community for information on community events and other items. The board is available for anyone to post information on and is being used for announcements of upcoming events, buy and sell, give aways, barter, and help wanted information