Closure of children’s emergency shelter in Columbia under investigation by Missouri regulators
by Annie Goldman and Anna Spidel, Missouri Independent
November 20, 2024
As the community grapples with the closure of the Rainbow House Children’s Emergency Shelter, questions remain about what led to the shutdown of the only shelter of its kind in mid-Missouri.
Allegations of misuse of funds have been raised by both community members and Rainbow House’s board of directors, and much of the blame has been placed on the organization’s former executive director, Melissa Faurot. But Faurot, who confirmed that she was terminated in August, said they’ve got it all wrong.
The emergency shelter shuttered its doors unexpectedly in September after providing thousands of children with a temporary home over nearly four decades, Rainbow House founder Kathy Hughes said.
In a matter of months, the nonprofit organization went from asking for millions of dollars for a significant renovation to being the subject of a state investigation.
“It was a complete shock to me,” Hughes said. She has not been significantly involved in Rainbow House’s operations for the past several years.
Rainbow House’s nearly 1.5-acre property in north Columbia is also pending a sale, hindering hopes that operations can return to normal.
As the community wrestles with the disappearance of what advocates considered a valuable resource to children and families in 11 Missouri counties, questions persist: What happened to Rainbow House?
And, what happened to the $1.2 million raised for the facility’s planned expansion, $1.1 million of which came from the Veterans United Foundation?
Melissa Faurot’s departure
In the past few months, Melissa Faurot’s name has consistently been included in online chatter about Rainbow House’s collapse.
Faurot, an attorney who was previously a board member and was part of the organization for over a decade, was the executive director of Rainbow House from August 2021 to August 2024.
“I’ve been silent for many months, and I’ve had the mud thrown at me … I’m not really interested in sitting back and being quiet anymore,” she said.
Faurot was terminated unexpectedly on Aug. 14 by the board of directors, she said. Faurot said she was not given a reason as to why she was terminated, but she speculates it had to do with disagreement between her and the board on how to handle the ongoing renovation, and the subsequent issues of fundraising.
She alleged that Rainbow House’s board of directors is misleading the community about who authorized the construction’s commencement, what happened to the money, why the emergency shelter was shut down and how the property ended up in the hands of the contracted construction company.
“I saw the writing on the wall. I knew that the blame was going to be placed on me because, well, somebody wanted a scapegoat,” she said.
Faurot also confirmed that the ongoing state investigation of Rainbow House is being facilitated by the Missouri Department of Social Services.
Rainbow House’s beginnings
Kathy Hughes founded Rainbow House in 1986. As an experienced foster parent and pediatric nurse, Hughes saw the need to provide children in short-term foster care with more stability.
Her family was fostering one child in particular who had been placed in emergency foster care and was being moved from house to house. After the child had been placed in her fifth school in three weeks, Hughes realized that the system was not serving children in the way that it should have upon initial intake.
“The system (was) doing her more harm than her father beating her did,” Hughes said. “The bruises were starting to heal, but we were making her feel like it was her fault and that she was being punished.”
Hughes started dreaming of a place where children who had experienced abuse or neglect could stay more permanently until the legal system reached a verdict on their futures, whether that’s returning home or being placed into long-term foster care.
She consulted different local government entities but settled on the reality that her vision of a physical home-like space devoted to this mission had to be established independently. Hughes found a “big old farmhouse” in Columbia with the capacity for up to 12 children, and with a loan, she purchased the property.
After nine months of renovations and preparation, Hughes was ready to open the doors of the emergency shelter. But when she was preparing to finally welcome children to the farmhouse on Oakland Gravel Road, she couldn’t decide on a name to give it — until she watched a storm pass and give way to a rainbow.
“We never see rainbows, except when we’ve just had a storm,” she said. “It all just kind of clicked. Here’s a place where children come after a storm, and we’re giving them a rainbow.”
From that day forward, the shelter was to be called Rainbow House.
Before it even had the proper licensing from the state, Rainbow House had eight kids to care for. The staff members at Rainbow House were issued a temporary license so they could take the children the very night law enforcement picked them up from an emergency situation.
“We hit the ground running,” Hughes said.
Hughes quit her job as a school nurse and became the emergency shelter’s executive director. She hired a handful of house parents, live-in staff members and recruited volunteers to fulfill the rest of the operation’s needs.
In the early years, Hughes led with the goal of having every child at Rainbow House remain in the school they were already enrolled in. The shelter’s staff drove the children to school in a donated van every morning. Rainbow House had immediate support from local schools and community members, Hughes said.
Hughes remained as Rainbow House’s executive director for three years. However, she said she has not had a hands-on relationship with the organization in the past few years, partly because “things seem to have been going quite smoothly, until very recently.”
She heard about the emergency shelter shutting down when a friend called to ask her about it and sent her a news article detailing the event.
“I’m as curious as everybody else as to what the heck happened,” Hughes said.
A multifaceted organization
Rainbow House has historically had two arms: The Rainbow House Children’s Emergency Shelter and the Rainbow House Regional Child Advocacy Center. Until its closure, the emergency shelter temporarily housed children in foster care or facing homelessness and assisted parents who requested placement for their children during crisis, according to the organization’s website. The child advocacy center provides forensic interviewing, advocacy and therapy for children who have been sexually or severely physically abused.
Although the shelter was Hughes’ first priority, the advocacy center was always part of the blueprint, she said. The center was built under one of Hughes’ successors across the street from the original emergency shelter.
“(The child advocacy center meant) that kids did not have to go to the emergency room to get forensic exams. They didn’t have to go to the police station to tell their story. They came to some place that felt much safer,” Hughes said.
In the new space, the advocacy center’s interviewing capabilities became more advanced. Hughes said the organization was able to videotape interviews with children, meaning questions that would have been asked to them in court could be asked in a more comfortable space, and then presented in court. This limited children having to testify in-person, which Hughes said was “huge.”
The advocacy center and the emergency shelter have always been housed under the same umbrella organization, Rainbow House. Hughes said that this decision was in the best interest of the children Rainbow House served.
Both the emergency shelter and the advocacy center moved to a joint facility on Towne Drive in 2004.
In addition to fundraising, Rainbow House has also benefitted from state funding for its emergency shelter through the state’s crisis care and foster care programs. Additionally, the child advocacy center is funded with federal money, from the Victims of Crime Act, and state money.
Rainbow House’s operations come to an end
At the time of the shelter’s shutdown this fall, Rainbow House was in the middle of a multimillion-dollar expansion. The organization was in the process of completing a new wing that would double the emergency shelter’s capacity.
While renovations were underway, the shelter’s operations were moved to a temporary location. Tyler Willy, president of Rainbow House’s board of directors, estimated that the shelter was serving five to seven children on any given day in its last few weeks of operation.
During this time, however, Rainbow House was only doing daytime services in a holding location, so there were no children spending the night and therefore none displaced, Willy said.
The shelter’s last day of accepting children was Sept. 27. The organization’s advocacy center has remained open, also in a temporary location while its permanent facility was being renovated, but a new partnership has stepped in to fill the void left by Rainbow House’s reduction of child advocacy center services.
Though it seemed like Rainbow House initially planned to keep its Regional Child Advocacy Center open, a new one will replace it. Missouri Network Against Child Abuse, a state agency representing all of Missouri’s child advocacy centers, has contracted with Partner for Better, a company that helps grow nonprofits and foundations, to open a new child advocacy center in Columbia.
Rainbow House’s Regional Child Advocacy Center will remain open until the new center, which will be called the Child Advocacy Center of Central Missouri, is established. The Boone County Commission approved the new center’s contract last week.
Having a child advocacy center in Boone County is statutorily mandated, and once the transition to the new center is complete, state and federal funds already allocated to Rainbow House will be transferred to the new organization.
This process is expected to take nine months to a year to complete, and no location for the new center has been set.
Closure amid an expansion
In 2022, Rainbow House launched a capital campaign in efforts to raise money for an expansion to its Towne Drive facility, despite staffing shortages.
The “Rebuild Our Rainbow” campaign had a fundraising goal of $2.6 million — the price of the slated renovations. Rainbow House received a $1.1 million contribution from the Veterans United Foundation in November 2021. The nonprofit was hoping to raise another $1.5 million.
However, Rainbow House never raised half of the total amount needed for the renovations.
The capital campaign has raised a total of $1,214,000, according to Rainbow House’s website — just 46% of the initial goal. When disregarding the Veterans United Foundation contribution, this leaves a total of just over $100,000 raised by outside sources.
The planned expansion to Rainbow House’s shelter was significant. It included adding a new wing that would double the shelter’s capacity from 18 children to 36, and it would allow the shelter to have separate living facilities for boys and girls, among other improvements. The advocacy center portion of the facility was also set to receive renovations.
Doubling the shelter’s capacity may have been a lofty goal for Rainbow House, as the facility reported staffing shortages in early 2022, just weeks before announcing the capital campaign, according to previous Missourian reporting. Because the shelter was required to maintain a specific ratio of youth specialists to children, the shelter had to limit the number of children it served at the time.
The shelter didn’t have enough staff to provide for every child in need, Faurot told the Missourian at the time. Nonetheless, plans to double the capacity of the shelter, and consequently the number of staff members needed, commenced.
Rainbow House may have jumped the gun on actually starting the renovations too. Renovations began in October 2023, according to Rainbow House’s website. Yet the funding goal had not been achieved at the time.
Dan Reynolds — president and owner of Holmes, Radford and Reynolds, a firm that specializes in capital campaign management — said nonprofits that embark on capital campaigns should ensure they have most of the funding needed before commencing construction.
“I think it’s best practice to secure upwards of 75-80% of those commitments and pledges before embarking on construction activities,” Reynolds said.
Rainbow House authorized construction with less than half of the money needed to complete construction. But there are conflicting accounts of who actually authorized this construction, which ultimately may have led to the shutdown of the shelter.
When Rainbow House announced the closure of its emergency shelter on Sept. 25, it simultaneously announced that the organization was signing over the shelter property to Little Dixie Construction, the company that had been working on the expansion. This decision was made to help alleviate “financial distress,” according to a news release.
John States, a managing partner at Little Dixie Construction, formed a new company, Towne Drive Investments LLC, on Aug. 22, according to Missouri secretary of state records. This new company then took ownership of the Rainbow House facility on Aug. 30.
The property would soon be put up for sale for over $3.5 million.
States did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Upon closure of the emergency shelter, Rainbow House said that it was “placed in a financially unsustainable position” after “high-level decisions” were made outside of guidelines approved by its board of directors, according to previous Missourian reporting. The nature of these “high-level decisions” remains unknown.
In late September, Willy, the board president, said the state launched an investigation into Rainbow House for “internal misallocation of funds.” He said that he could not speak on whether the state investigation is focused on the advocacy center, the emergency shelter or both.
Willy said the only person with access to the funds under investigation was terminated from Rainbow House in August. Willy was presumably referring to Faurot, and Faurot said “everybody knows he was making the assumption it was me.”
Faurot referred to Willy’s claims as inaccurate.
“For him to say out loud … that I was the only one that had access to the funds shows how little he knows about the organization,” she said.
Any expenditure over $5,000 had to be approved by Rainbow House’s board of directors, Faurot said, meaning that she did not have the power to authorize the start of the expansion project, and therefore could not have been responsible for the financial wrongdoing that the board has been claiming.
Willy said that when he joined the board of directors, the construction had already been authorized. All other current board members also joined after the expansion was already authorized, he said.
“None of us voted on the construction,” he said, referring to the board of directors.
Faurot said the board approved the start of construction for the expansion, and the construction company broke ground in October 2023. By late spring of 2024, funding for the project was dwindling, she said.
When the financial situation reached a dire point, the board of directors discussed signing the building over to Little Dixie Construction, Faurot said, which she was adamantly opposed to. The construction was only halfway completed, and Rainbow House owed money to Little Dixie Construction to finish the project, yet the capital campaign money had run out, Faurot said.
“I told (the board), in my opinion, if they chose to do that, that it would be the end of Rainbow House,” she said.
Faurot was then terminated by the board of directors shortly before the plans for transferring ownership of the building were finalized, she said.
Richie Vanskike, Rainbow House’s director of development from 2019 to 2022, said part of the capital campaign was his responsibility. When the plans for the renovations were drawn, the goal was to expand the facility but avoid walking away in debt, he said.
The start of construction was authorized with the hope that the rest of the money needed would come in, but the outreach efforts weren’t there, Vanskike said, though he had left the organization prior to this time. He said the staff positions related to marketing and reaching out to the community to raise funds were not filled at the time, so the additional money was never secured.
Vanskike added that toward the end of the shelter’s run, he doubts there were any volunteers working at the facility, as there “wasn’t anyone to facilitate that.” The volunteer coordinator position, which Rainbow House had in the past to facilitate background checks and organize volunteering, wasn’t filled or didn’t exist anymore, he said.
“I don’t know what happened to (the volunteer coordinator position). To tell you the truth, it is kind of like all the positions there,” he said. “Those positions … they seem to have been just kind of done away with.”
Several sources concurred that Rainbow House was facing staffing shortages at various points.
The future of 1611 Towne Drive
What was formerly Rainbow House’s facility on Towne Drive has been put up for sale for over $3.5 million, according to several real estate websites. The building’s identifying “Rainbow House” sign has been stripped from above its door, and the sale of the facility is currently pending.
While the state-supervised Child Advocacy Center of Central Missouri may see a revival under Partner For Better’s leadership, the future of children’s emergency shelters in mid-Missouri remains up in the air.
Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries is an organization that aims to provide safe homes for children in foster care in mid-Missouri. It has tried to partner with Rainbow House in the past to bridge the gap between emergency care and long-term foster care for children, said Kari Hopkins, Coyote Hill’s chief operating officer. A lot of the children that were served by Rainbow House could potentially have ended up in a Coyote Hill home for more long-term care, Hopkins said.
But Rainbow House was not interested in the partnership when discussions were had prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hopkins said, and the organization cited that it wanted to remain focused on existing services.
She said the community is devastated by the emergency shelter’s closure, and Coyote Hill is currently in early conversations with the state regarding how the organization could help fill the void of emergency placement and temporary care for children, in hopes of keeping families together and preventing children from needing foster care in the first place.
“The people who hurt the most are our kids, and that is not easy for us in this world of foster care,” Hopkins said.
Willy told the Missourian that Rainbow House’s board of directors also plans to open a new emergency shelter, and they have identified a group that would run its operations.
He said the board will soon be asking for funding to help the new shelter get off the ground. The shelter will not be located at Rainbow House’s former location, Willy added.
Hughes hopes that the community will rally together to address the ongoing need for emergency services for children.
“Child abuse continues,” Hughes said. “Child neglect continues. Family crisis continues.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.
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