Buffett's sister gives $250,000 challenge for new respite home

Doris Buffett has awarded a grant to aid people with developmental disabilities.

A surprise offer has given a significant boost to a local group's efforts to build a respite home in Norwell for people with developmental disabilities.

Doris Buffett, the sister of billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, recently awarded Friendship Home Inc. a $250,000 challenge grant through her Sunshine Lady Foundation to help with its building project. To access the grant, the Friendship Home needs to raise $450,000 by Feb. 1.

"This is really a great shot in the arm for us," said Wilma Goodhue of Norwell, cofounder and president of the Hingham-based nonprofit, "because it's a wonderful challenge. It gives our potential donors an incentive to give now."

Friendship Home has raised about $1 million of the $3 million it needs to build the home and fund initial operating costs. An additional $450,000, coupled with the $250,000 from Buffett's grant, would bring the figure to $1.7 million, enough to fund the project's first phase: construction of the building exterior and some of the interior.

The home would be a place where people 18 and over with developmental disabilities could stay for short periods of time to give their families a break from the responsibilities of caring for them. It would also be a central meeting site for the "Friendship Club," a program in which individuals with developmental disabilities meet socially while their families enjoy respite time.

Goodhue said completion of the project's first phase would enable the group to begin serving people at the site.

The 12,600-square-foot home would be built on a 1.5-acre site behind the United Church of Christ in Norwell on Route 123. In 2004, church members voted unanimously to dedicate the site for the purpose.

The grant resulted from the efforts of Pat Bordewieck, a Norwell friend of Goodhue's who met and befriended Buffett when she and her husband were honeymooning at a Pennsylvania spa in 2002.

Buffett recruited Bordiewieck to be one of her "sunbeams," people who advise her of groups they believe are worthy of receiving grants from her foundation. It was on Bordewieck's recommendation that Buffett, who lives in Virginia and Maine, awarded Friendship Home the challenge grant.

Interviewed by phone from her Maine home, Buffett said the Friendship Home project "happens to fit into an area we are very concerned about," noting that her foundation has provided funding for other agencies serving the developmentally disabled.

"So I was happy to take it on," she said of the Norwell project, "and delighted to be able to honor" Bordewieck for her years of community work.

Goodhue and Joan Mullare, who both have adult children with developmental disabilities, started Friendship Home in 1999. The two Norwell residents are members of the state Department of Mental Retardation's Southeast Regional and its South Coastal Area Citizen Advisory boards.

In 1998, the two visited a respite home for people with developmental disabilities in Hopkinton.

"It was a very warm, welcoming, well-run home," Goodhue recalled. "When we left there, we were not even seated in the car, we looked at each other and said, 'The South Shore has got to have a respite home.' That was the birth of Friendship Home."

Goodhue said there is no respite home in the region stretching from Milton to the end of Cape Cod. About 2,460 individuals with developmental disabilities reside in that region. A respite home in Westwood provides her group with one bed each weekend for individuals from her region.

Goodhue said respite is vital to families, as providing around-the-clock care can be "emotionally and physically exhausting." She said it is beneficial to individuals with disabilities, giving them "time to be with peers and opportunities for new experiences."

To donate to Friendship Home, make a check payable to Friendship Home Inc., 4 Pond Park Road, Hingham, MA 02043. For more information, go to www.friendshiphome.net.