News

Children's advocates toast agency's 15th birthday

Children and Family Resource Center chair Steve Gwaltney and Executive Director Elisha Freeman toast the 15th anniversary of the center.

By Bill Moss, Published: August 28, 2014

If their first office was small — a spare storage room at First Citizens Bank — their vision was large. The new center would be a clearinghouse for services that help young children get as strong a start as possible.

On Thursday afternoon the Children and Family Resource Center celebrated its 15th anniversary with comments from past and present leaders, tours of the center, reminisces about early challenges and triumphs and a champagne toast.
"If you think about it, we have been doing this for people with no voice and no vote — just the kids," Spence Campbell, the first chair of the nonprofit organization, told the past and present board members, donors and other supporters of the center gathered outdoors under a blazing August sun.
Programs have helped young moms earn dignity, train for jobs, escape poverty and sometimes abuse and become contributing members of society. The programs "give them the ability to contribute to this community in ways that they never thought to be possible," Campbell said. "These are not easy things to do and yet we found the people that are good at it and they've been here a long time, a lot of them.
"Something else happened that we didn't expect. We talked to the politicians in the area and we started to talk to them Founding chair Spence Campbell and Renee Kumor, who succeeded Campbell as chair, share a laugh about the early days.about the priorities for the needs of kids. The top priority for kids a few years back was access to health care. It was hurting their ability to be good students in school, and nobody wants to deal with this. So we led the effort to have a communitywide forum that developed a list of priorities, and that's what the politicians paid attention to."
Executive Director Elisha Freeman thanked the founding leaders for their early commitment and investment 15 years ago in the center.
"That's exactly what we do here at the center — making investments early on in a child's life, making investments that will ensure their success in the future, and we do that because we believe that in those first years is the time we can make the most difference in a person's life."