STANWOOD – For the past few years, a typical work day for Chuck Durland might include friendly chats in the downstairs bingo hall one moment and budget-crunching a multimillion-dollar construction project the next.
Now, just a few months after opening a new $3.7 million wing of 44 new senior apartments at the Stanwood Senior Center, Durland is leaving his post as the center’s executive director at the end of the month.
Supervising the six-year effort from start to finish took a big toll on the 61-year-old.
“It kind of wore me out,” he said. “It’s like taking on another full-time job.”
Sitting in the new wing’s lobby, Durland said he is satisfied with the contributions he’s made, although he was quick to credit others for the center’s progress.
Since the nonprofit group’s beginnings in 1972, it has transformed the old Lincoln High School into a burgeoning senior center with an almost $1 million annual budget, 85 apartments, 193 volunteers, a bingo hall, a cafeteria and a thrift store that hauls in $80,000 a year.
Durland’s most obvious legacy will be the new wing of apartments. When he took the job in 1995, his predecessor, Jan Cooley, and the center’s president, Bob Whipple, had just finished the center’s second big expansion, adding 25 apartments in 1991 and another 16 in 1994.
“What I’ve done is built on their efforts,” Durland said.
He came to the Pacific Northwest in 1994 from Tennessee, where he had worked with seniors since 1973. Durland got his master’s degree in public administration in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee and then worked for the state’s Commission on Aging for seven years.
He then took a job at a nonprofit senior center in Nashville for eight years and managed a senior housing project for another five years.
The experience came in handy after he moved to Portland, Ore., in 1994 to be near relatives. He noticed a job announcement for the senior center in Stanwood, a place he had never heard of. The position was a perfect fit.
“They had housing and a senior center, and I had done both,” Durland said.
Despite all the new housing, early brainstorming sessions with the center’s board of directors and others indicated more demand for low-cost housing. The previous apartments had been built in converted classrooms in the old school. That building had no more room.
To expand, they would have to build a new wing. Durland helped secure a $3.7 million grant from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development to build the new low-income apartments. The addition would end up being almost as big as the original school next door.
Now that the project is finished, Durland is ready to move on. He took a job as a senior grants analyst with Snohomish County’s office of Housing and Community Development. He’ll be reviewing projects from other senior centers.
“I started off as a bureaucrat, and I’m ending up as a bureaucrat,” he said.
He offered this advice to whoever fills his position. “The next step is to develop a better fund-raising capability.”
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