Gifts, lot sale keep agency for blind open

Talk of LR closure dropped

Just two months after officials at World Services for the Blind warned clients that they might not have a campus to return to after the Christmas break, the organization’s new leader said Friday that not only has its financial distress gone away, but it also plans to offer two new vocational studies this year.

World Services for the Blind is a nationally accredited adult rehabilitation center in Little Rock that provides a college preparatory program, vision rehabilitation, vocational courses, an assisted technology learning center, job-placement assistance and a personal-adjustment program. The organization also offers the sole location in the nation for an Internal Revenue Service vocational

program that fast-tracks graduates to guaranteed jobs with the IRS.

Clients live on campus at the agency’s headquarters off Fair Park Boulevard. They were told in December by then-President and Chief Executive Officer Stacey Hunter Schwartz to take all of their belongings home over the break because the organization was “in a pretty dire financial state” and might not reopen.

Schwartz resigned from her position just days after telling the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she was desperately searching for donors and a smaller campus because the organization couldn’t maintain its 91-bed facility with only a third of that number in clients. She had been with the agency for a month and declined to say specifically why she resigned. Bruce Davis, a member of the nonprofit organization’s board of directors since 2008, has been appointed as interim CEO and said he will remain in the post for the time being. But eventually, the organization will search for a new executive.

World Services for the Blind reopened on schedule last week and has no immediate or long-term plans to close, Davis said Friday.

Since Schwartz’s announcement, World Services for the Blind has received some “significant contributions” and has sold its downtown property that had been on the market for years, and those two developments “removed the immediate financial concerns,” Davis said.

World Services for the Blind also has acquired a grant worth more than $300,000 from the Lions Club International Foundation that will assist the agency in adding vocational training in medical coding and call-center skills.

Both vocations will be added by the end of the year, raising the organization’s vocational-course offerings to 11.

Three staff members will be added, and there also will be a job-referral program started as part of the two-year Lions Club grant, Davis said.

“While we continue to be interested in partners, we plan to continue on our own until such time someone comes along who we’d be interested in partnering with,” Davis said.

“If they don’t come, then we will continue as we have for the past 67 years. … We could be interested [in relocating to a smaller campus] if the right opportunity avails itself, but we are happy where we are if that doesn’t happen.”

The agency’s downtown property sold to One Financial Center Limited Partnership for $1.5 million. The site — bordered by Sixth Street to the north, College Street to the east, Eighth Street to the south and Collins Street to the west — includes about 50,000-square-feet of buildings and totals 7 acres.

World Services for the Blind originally acquired the land in 2004 and 2005 for about $3.9 million. There were plans to enclose the streets and build a $30 million, 10-acre campus. Fundraising goals were never met, however, and the organization abandoned those plans in 2010.

The property has been for sale ever since, but there were few offers.

“It’s certainly not what we had hoped to secure the property for,” said John Martin, vice president of commercial brokerage at Moses Tucker Real Estate, who handled the sale.

“We had plans that we would be able to do more than that, but given that One Financial was the buyer, they made it clear that that was all they were capable of doing. At the end of the day, it made sense for both sides to do the deal. The timing was right, so we felt like it was a reasonable deal.”

Stan Hasting, who is part of the family that owns One Financial Center Limited Partnership, said the family has adjacent property and had previously tried to purchase the land from World Services for the Blind. There are no plans to build anything there, Hasting said, adding that the family will continue leasing out the buildings.

While the $1.5 million sale was short of hopes, it allowed World Services for the Blind to continue operations for its clients. The organization is otherwise financed solely through donations, the tuition paid by state rehabilitation agencies for the clients and through grants.

The organization hasn’t filled more than a third of its 91-bed capacity in the past five years, but Davis hopes that will change with the growth that’s coming. He said the training center’s clients number in the upper 20s and he expects that to increase to the upper 30s by March, when one of the new vocational training courses is added.

The organization has served clients from the 50 states and 57 countries.

All the clients who were at the campus before Christmas and New Year’s break returned, he said. While about 10 employees were laid off in November, no additional workers have been laid off.

“People need to understand we are in business. Our clients have come back, and we expect to have an increased number by the end of March,” Davis said. “We are very excited about what’s happening because it’s all positive in our view.”