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Click Here for photos from the event! |
Grand Island Shelter Celebrates 15 Years, Opens Safe Place Havens
Irene Abernathy doesn’t take “No” for an answer. Because of her passion and tenacity, the “First Lady” of the Boys Town Grand Island Shelter helped staff members and the community celebrate 15 years of service to more than 4,500 children with an open house on September 2.
“I was on the State Crime Commission for several years and realized the needs of juveniles in Nebraska,” said Abernathy, an educator, community leader and the first woman elected to the Hall County (Grand Island) Board of Supervisors, where she served for more than 20 years. “So when I was appointed Chairman of the Nebraska Juvenile Justice Committee, I took a very close look at what our needs were, and it was really important to have places for homeless and runaway youngsters.”
Abernathy turned to Boys Town. She made an appointment with National Executive Director Father Val Peter and Dr. Dan Daly, Associate Executive Director for Home Campus, to persuade them to build an emergency shelter in Grand Island. “We knew we wanted to expand somewhere else in Nebraska other than Omaha,” said Dr. Daly. “Irene and her community are the reasons we came here.”
Abernathy, along with the local Family Preservation Team Chairman Dory Bush, dug out law enforcement statistics from police departments, sheriffs’ offices and the State Patrol for the nine-county central Nebraska region to document the need for federal money. They sought letters of support from community leaders, worked with government and business leaders to find land, found a temporary shelter while Boys Town built the present facility and even ordered extra sturdy furniture from Oklahoma.
“It was because of people like Abernathy and many, many others that we’re able to take care of kids here,” said Father Peter. “That’s very important in your community. Everyone needs to know you are a caring community.”
That caring community in Grand Island expanded with the announcement of a partnership between Boys Town and another national organization called “Safe Place.” So far, the Grand Island Crisis Center, the Central District Health Department and the YMCA have signed on to be Safe Place partners with the Grand Island Shelter.
“Safe Place locations all over the country provide places for a child to go when they are in trouble,” explained Shelter Coordinator Dave Reed during his announcement. “We do the work, we educate the kids and we educate the community. If the kids see the sign, they know it’s a place they can go for help. And the business will call us, our staff will be there within 15 or 20 minutes to talk with the youth to help them solve what problems they have and to help them make some decisions on what needs to happen for the future.”
Reed said he is confident that more partners in the Grand Island area will join the Boys Town and Safe Place effort.
Nebraska Third District Congressman Tom Osborne also attended the ceremony. He emphasized the pivotal role the shelter is playing in the lives of all the children who come through it.
“There has probably never been a more difficult time to be a young person in our country than today,” said Osborne, who saw children’s social landscape change drastically in his 36 years of coaching football at the University of Nebraska. “Today we have around 20 million fatherless children and a lot of dysfunction in families. The future of any civilization depends on the next generation.”
Osborne said that history repeatedly shows how great civilizations crumble from the internal factors and not from outside forces.
“We have to maintain a strong environment. We have to maintain a healthy youth and we have to maintain a healthy culture,” he said. Osborne told the children attending the ceremony, “I am sure you have experienced some adversity, some difficult times. We experienced that in Nebraska football. There are basically two ways you could handle it. One is to give up or to quit, or to blame somebody else. But another way to handle it is to simply say this was a tough situation. This was difficult. This was very painful. But it’s also an opportunity. If you think about people, most of the time when they really grow, when they mature and get stronger, it’s when adversity hits. This is when great things happen. So hopefully, you will use this opportunity and this time here to become stronger and to evaluate what’s happened to you and maybe make a new beginning.”
Thanks to Irene Abernathy and her Grand Island community, more than 4,500 children have been given chances at new beginnings. Thanks to the Boys Town and Safe Place partnership, the Grand Island Shelter will open many more doors so that other children can find those beginnings.
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