St. Vincent de Paul launches website for St. Mary Conference Society

KINGMAN – Better late than never, St. Vincent de Paul has launched a website for the St. Mary Conference Society that describes the mission of the nonprofit organization and provides links for client assistance.

James Haseltine, treasurer of St. Vincent de Paul Society in Kingman, was tasked with developing the website a couple months ago and looked into Google services for domain operations.

Haseltine started small when he set up the website, expanding it with client services, donor page, resources, and links to other agencies and organizations. You can visit the website at www.svdpkingman.org.

“It’s a place for people to get to know our conference, and then we started adding features for people interested in volunteering,” Haseltine said Wednesday at St. Vincent’s Thrift Store at 218 E. Beale St. “It lets them be able to contact us.”

The donor page has a form to have items picked up from homes.

Donations are key to the success of St. Vincent’s programs. Donated items are sorted and placed on racks and shelves at the thrift store for sale, and proceeds from those sales pay for clothes, furniture and food given to people in dire need.

St. Vincent de Paul offers free food from its pantry, emergency assistance paying utilities, travel money to get people back home, school shirts for kids and furniture for the home. Sack lunches are provided to the homeless during store hours (9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday).

The website has been up for almost two months and has 40 active members receiving the newsletter, Haseltine said.

“We have a page just for client services where clients can receive assistance with clothing and stuff,” he said. “If somebody’s house burned down, we help with furniture or if they come here with nothing.”

Haseltine said he became interested in computers while in high school in Chicago, when personal computers were bursting onto the technology scene. He attended a technical school for computer programming.

After working in client services and doing home visits, Haseltine took over as treasurer at St. Vincent de Paul about five months ago and learned that the charity was using Office Home software from 2010.

He was able to update with Office Professional 2016 for free because of St. Vincent’s nonprofit status, and from there he learned about the Google service for a website domain for $12.

“I have worked hard to try and make it user-friendly for the general visitor or for clients trying to access our services,” Haseltine said. “We hope the public will utilize it to keep up on our store activities and to access links to information and to begin the process to receive our emergency assistance.”

Mary Chou-Thompson, marketing director for St. Vincent de Paul in Phoenix, said the state website was revamped a couple years ago with an update to the logo and organization branding, and the Kingman thrift store was given its own page.

St. Vincent de Paul Society is organized by St. Mary’s Catholic Church, serving Kingman and Golden Valley.

Client Services, located next to the thrift shop, provides food and clothing and emergency utility assistant as funding is available.