Ashley Bulley is eager to connect with her community and make a direct impact. That’s what appealed to her, she said, about becoming executive director of Elizabethtown Community Housing & Outreach Services, ECHOS.
Bulley, who hails from Palmyra in Lebanon County, came to ECHOS from the Girl Scouts of the Chesapeake Bay, where she was chief operating officer. She worked remotely for the organization, which serves Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia, for four years. She says she felt too removed from the frontline work: the difference being made in the lives of young girls.
“I wanted to be able to see that,” she said.
She applied for the ECHOS position when she saw it was open, and interviewed with Chris Ridge and Dr. Deborah Riley, the outgoing and incoming board chairs, respectively. Her appointment was announced in May.
Founded in 2016 by a coalition of churches and community members and formalized as a nonprofit two years later, ECHOS offers a broad range of programs focused on housing and economic stability. Its service area encompasses Bainbridge, Elizabethtown, Rheems, Mount Joy, Maytown, and Marietta.
It headquarters are located at the Community Place on Washington social services campus, a block or so off South Market Street in Elizabethtown. There, its Enrichment Center provides training, information, case management and referrals.
Its winter emergency shelter, just downstairs from the Enrichment Center, provided 85 individuals with 3,290 bed-nights in 2023-24. ECHOS also offers short-term emergency housing for people in crisis and longer-term supportive housing for those who need extra help.
ECHOS currently has a staff of nine, plus nearly 200 volunteers who contribute more than 4,000 hours a year. In 2022-23, Echos served nearly 900 individuals on a budget of around $900,000.
Board member Joe Murphy said he’s seen first-hand the difference it makes to have a local resource like ECHOS, where people can receive help in their own community and make a fresh start.
The board is proud of what has been built, but wants to keep on making it better, he said. Bulley, he said, combines a vision for serving the community with openness to trying new ideas and approaches.
When One United Lancaster spoke with Bulley, she had been in her role just six weeks. The discussion began with Bulley explaining her background and motivation for joining ECHOS.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Ashley Bulley: I have a degree in communications and a master’s in public administration, but I haven’t worked in the world of social services before. My strengths are in the operations of an organization, the team culture.
I was looking to learn something new, to grow my horizons. … I wanted the opportunity to be able to engage with our clients, to see the work that we were doing, to see that mission in action. In doing my due diligence, learning about ECHOS and learning about the work and the team, what our mission was, what our vision was for the organization, it felt like the right fit.
One United Lancaster: What have you learned over the past six weeks?
Bulley: I have learned a lot! I think the hardest piece to navigate for an organization like ours is all of the funding sources. Managing the grants and the guidelines, and living within those (constraints), and having to manage how we provide the services that we are funded for. And then (figuring out) what our bandwidth is outside of grant funding, to support other needs. …
So, I think that’s the biggest piece that I’ve learned: How do we grow our community funding that’s unrestricted, to be able to enhance the services and the lives and the resources of our clients.
I would say that there’s a lot of opportunity with our current board to look at how we diversify our funding, how we diversify our portfolio and invest to create long term financial sustainability.
OUL: What are you seeing in terms of community need? Are there aspects that are more concerning than you expected, or better?
Bulley: I know rural poverty exists. I grew up in rural poverty. What I didn’t know was the lack of resources that were dedicated (to it). Because it’s kind of invisible to many people. In rural areas, they say, “That’s not in my community,” because it’s not in front of your face like it is in the city. So, that piece was a little shocking to me.
Many individuals who have been around for a while will say that part of their “why” for ECHOS, is because when they learned that this was a need that their neighbors had, they were shocked, and they wanted to be able to rise to the occasion to support them. They said, “That can’t happen in my community.” And then they saw it. …
One of the amazing pieces when I started was Liz Henry, our enrichment coordinator, who manages the Enrichment Center. She was able to engage with so many partner agencies to come to the table to say, “You have an impact on our unhoused … Let us be a space for you to help support them in ways that we don’t have resources to do.”
OUL: Who are some of them?
Bulley: We have the EMT group (Lancaster EMS). We have the Naaman Center (a substance abuse treatment nonprofit), who lease the space from us upstairs. They come down and spend time here. We have the shower vehicle, Refresh Lancaster. We have had community salons coming and doing haircuts for our clients. We have had financial organizations coming and doing workshops for us. We have an organization that just recently came, Penn Medicine. We’ve partnered with them in our enrichment center.
Liz has done a great job in finding those partners. It’s the idea of how community coming together is so important, and that we all need to be at the table having these conversations.
OUL: Do you have any other near-term priorities?
Bulley: One of the pieces that we have in our name, “Elizabethtown, Housing & Outreach Services,” is outreach, but we don’t do what you would call traditional street outreach at the moment.
So, we’re looking at what our capacity is to go into our full-service area to where individuals are, if they’re not able or willing to come into our Enrichment Center. As we look to future capacity building, it’s definitely around street outreach. …
It’s just all about long term sustainable growth, and how do we do that in a way that brings our community along with us. … One thing I’ve said to the board is that in the first three to four months, my goal is really to get out to the community and meet individuals in similar roles at similar organizations, and also get (a sense) of where we need to build better partnerships.
I’m coming in with fresh eyes, so I’m looking at every opportunity to engage and connect and share about our work but also to hear about other organizations work and how we can partner. … I’m looking for likeminded individuals, whether we’re able to partner or not, just to learn and bounce ideas around and talk about best practices.
