Photo courtesy of Hospice of Washington County.

Shrieks and giggles were received when the Washington County Riverboat Foundation announced one of their 2021 large grant recipients this month.

Hospice of Washington County was awarded $400,000 for their building project that’s under construction. Hospice now has approximately $930,000 raised toward their roughly $1.5 million project for a 5,100 square foot facility being added to the northside of the current building with planned demolition of their southern facility that frequently floods in the basement. A bioswale will be landscaped in that floodplain to control stormwater runoff.

Hospice Director Katrina Altenhofen says when her staff was invited to attend the foundation’s public meeting on October 6th, she felt they were bound to get good news, “We like to say the glass is definitely half full and we were sure that we were probably going to get something, because we had already received an invite to do a presentation to the entire board, and I believe that was back in September that we wound up doing that. And so we were excited and as I’ve said to other individuals, if we got one dollar that would be one dollar less that we needed to have in a loan. So to hear that we receive that 400,000, we were just simply ecstatic.”

Altenhofen says they hope to raise a few more hundred thousand dollars to offset debt incurred on the project. The new building is set to be completed in January, to better serve the patients and families of their seven-county region.