The Nantucket Boys & Girls Club completed a purchase of the property at 75 Sparks Avenue for $1 million last Friday. Executive Director Jamie Foster said the purchase was made using funds from the club’s ongoing Employee Housing Capital Campaign.
“We are still in an employee housing capital campaign so we raised the funds so far to acquire the property and to build up our building and maintenance funds because we have some beautiful properties now and they will have to be maintained,” Foster said.
Foster said the sellers, Laddy and Jack Mcelderry, are friends of the club and are planning to retire down in Florida, which led to their decision to move on from the property.
“They asked us if this property would be something we would like to pursue,” Foster said. “The trustees felt like it was a smart move obviously with the location.”
Foster said since the opening of the Boys & Girls Club’s new facility in 2017 there has been a major focus on quality employee housing.
“The trustees recognized pretty early on after we built the new building in 2017 that you can build a great building but you need housing for great employees,” Foster said. “The biggest thing we have learned through our research with employees is that with the people in employee housing, the retention level of keeping them is so much greater than for the people who we couldn’t provide housing for.”
“Also since we are working with kids we feel the retention of our staff who these kids are comfortable with is huge. If you have a revolving door of counselors kids never really buy into us and feel like they have someone to talk to.”
The club has 22-beds for their full-time employees with housing units ranging from one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom apartments.
“We have a quad with four individual one-bedroom apartments and then we have two duplexes,” Foster said. “One with a three bedroom and two bedroom apartment, another one which is a two bedroom, two bedroom, and our latest one we just built and moved people in in September we are calling a triplex and it has a two bedroom, two bath on the top floor, two bedroom, two bath on the middle floor, and a one bedroom, walk out suite in the basement.”
Foster said the 75 Sparks Avenue property is in very good condition and will only need minor maintenance done such as some paint jobs and the addition of window blinds.
