We Love Our New Headquarters in Capitol Plaza!
The staff at our new headquarters are all settled in! In late June, Boys & Girls Aid moved our headquarters to a new location located 9320 SW Barbur Boulevard in Portland. We could not have done it without our staff being flexible and working diligently to make this move as smooth as possible!
Boys & Girls Aid has several locations throughout the Portland metro area where we provide services. For the previous two-plus decades, our headquarters was located on the corner of Southwest Boundary Court and Corbett Avenue in Portland. Our adoption, foster care and administration staff operated out of this building.
Over the years, we hosted a school attended by children in foster care, we held frequent trainings for anyone pursuing adoption and we hosted a number of events that educated the public on child welfare. In the last five years, we have outgrown the space.
Wanting to better serve youth in our programs, we decided to split our adoption and administrative staff and our foster care staff into two separate buildings. Our adoption and administration teams moved to Capital Plaza on Barbur Boulevard and our foster care program moved to a multi-purpose facility in southeast Portland.
We set about the move last November when we put our old headquarters on the market and sold it for $4.7 million. On March 28, 2018, the building closed with a new buyer for $4.4 million.
To go into greater detail about the move, there were three reasons for the building sale:
There was a high level of deferred maintenance needed on the building that was going to cost Boys & Girls Aid a significant amount in repairs.
The current space is not conducive to serving the number of youth currently in our program, nor is the adoption and administration utilizing the existing space well, and the building is not in compliance will updated ADA standards.
We need to add revenue to our investments to ensure the strength of the agency.
In addition to the sale of the building, we are conducting a capital campaign to assist with build out, tenant improvements and new furniture for both locations. When all is said and done, we will be adding nearly $3.5 million into our investments - more than doubling the portfolio’s current size. This additional revenue will strengthen our agency overall and assist with the security of continued programming.
Other than addressing the financial side of the decision, we also needed an open space for our administrative and adoption staff. With an open work space, we could promote collaboration across teams. With it, we could provide more natural elements like better lighting in a functional and flexible space to improve work across teams.
To better address all our teams and our families needs, we now have seven meeting rooms with varying capacities and audiovisual configurations. Our meeting rooms are called after our beautiful Portland bridges. We have rooms named after the Burnside, Broadway, Sellwood, Steel, Hawthorne and St. John's bridges.
The office is simple, elegant and friendly. It has clean lines with teal color walls, and beautiful portraits of children we have served.
The work of child welfare can be very stressful so finding a work-life balance is important. We needed spaces to wind down and decompress. A happy and healthy staff means better support for children in foster care.
We thank all of the Boys & Girls Aid staff and volunteers for doing such an amazing job helping with our move. Thanks to everybody who helped throughout the planning and execution of the move. We look forward to our staff and families to enjoy this special space, together with us.
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