Hello, this is Nolan Formalarie with DiscoverNChomes. St. James, welcome! I have Skip Shaw here – Skip, thank you so much for having me. Skip is with St. James Nest, and I wanted just to quickly talk about a personal experience I’ve had with the group. Absolutely first class, he was helping out a client of mine over in Cottage at Regency Lakes and I was seriously so impressed before I even knew who this group was. They helped this client move, they helped him find an assisted living situation up north, they helped soup to nuts with the entire process. So that is the reason you’re here today. So please tell us a little bit about your group and what you guys do.

Skip
Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity, It’s great to be here. So, St. James NEST is a grassroots organization that is based on the “village” concept launched in the Back Bay section of Boston about a decade ago. Currently, there’s about 350 villages in the United States with more in development every day.

The whole idea of a village, which St. James Nest is, is neighbors helping neighbors to age in place safely for as long as they possibly can. So here at St. James, many of us have come from different parts of the country, we’ve left extended families back home, wherever home was. And so as we age, as we may have an illness issue, an injury issue, and we need the help that extended family might otherwise provide, we used the village concept to bring neighbors to assist where extended family may not be available.

So we launched in September of 2020, right at the height of Covid and that brought its own challenges. We had, at that time, 14 members, who were the folks that need the services, and we had 38 volunteers who were the folks that provide the services.

At this point, two years later, we have 120 members, we have about the same number of volunteers, which include both the folks that directly provide services as well as the folks in the back office that help with the IT and marketing and other needed functions. In that time, our wonderful team of volunteers has provided over 2,000 service requests to our members.

We do a lot of driving people to medical appointments, to pick up groceries, etc. Every request that gets put into our system is met. We virtually have no requests that go unfulfilled. And it’s all due to the wonderful people we have here at St. James.

Nolan
Yes, the community it truly is amazing. Again, I was just so impressed with the sales process, and I think this particular client was at a point where needed to move to the next steps. You guys again, just completely took care of everything, from contacting folks to helping him go through paperwork, to paying bills, everything. So I was just most impressed with that, and that’s kind of the way we like to operate our business too.

Again, thank you so much, Skip, I appreciate it. If you have any information for Skip directly, the website will be posted in this blog: sjnest.org and on the newsletter, the help desk phone number will be here, too: (910) 250-8388.

As always, you can reach out to me and again, what a great concept and I’m amazed how quickly you guys have grown, but it’s such a needed asset to our community.

Skip
It’s based on the wonderful people here in St. James!

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St. James NEST

Website: sjnest.org

Help desk phone number: (910) 250-8388.

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About Nolan Formalarie

Nolan Formalarie has been in the North Carolina Real Estate Industry for over 8 years and enjoys every minute of it. He is involved in every aspect of the industry including selling and purchasing residential property, home watch services, property management, association management and construction.