Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey want to raise a $2.5 million endowment to put Covenant House on more stable financial footing before they leave at year’s end.

As the government shifts priorities and cuts social services spending, Covenant House can no longer rely on government and foundation funding for long-term support, Ferraro said.

They have raised $1.05 million since beginning the campaign a year ago and hope to complete the endowment before they leave. “It would take one special person who really believes in our unique mission and would like to see it continue,” Ferraro said.

Ferraro and Hussey have led the nonprofit group since they helped found it in 1981 when they were still nuns. They subsequently left their religious order rather than recant their support for a dialogue on reproductive rights. The two will retire here and move back to New England, where they will be near family and expect to find new jobs.

In the beginning, community leaders asked Ferraro and Hussey to create Covenant House to provide the poor and homeless a place where they could get counseling, pick up mail, take showers and do laundry.

"Twenty-five years later, we’re coming back to the community and asking them to renew the covenant with us again," Ferraro said. "That covenant was a promise we made to the community and the community made to us. ‘Us’ isn’t Pat and Barbara. ‘Us’ is Covenant House."

Tom Heywood and Gail Forsythe are leading the volunteers who are doing much of the fundraising, Ferraro said.

The campaign has received big gifts from the Jacobson Foundation, Dow, McJunkin Corp. and the Herscher Foundation, Ferraro said. The largest gift was $100,000.

Ferraro conceded that endowment campaigns are less exciting to donors than bricks-and-mortar campaigns. “We’ve done bricks and mortar. We’re in the building debt-free. We’ve been fiscally responsible. People know we’ll do with the money what we say we’ll do with the money.”

To learn more about Covenant House and the campaign, call 344-1479, ext. 21, or visit www.wvcovenanthouse.org.