The Boys and Girls Club held a pep rally last week, complete with inflatables, to celebrate its new, temporary home at the Mcfadden Community Center.
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Hope is more important than ever at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Rutherford County’s Murfreesboro location.
And hope is what will be delivered at the 22nd annual Steak and Burger in the form of Lonise Bias, a woman thrust into community activism after the untimely deaths of her sons.
The club’s Jones Boulevard location was devastated by a tornado last weekend, which tore the roof off the building, leaving the club with no home.
“The Boys & Girls Club is not a facility but relationships and programs,” club spokeswoman Michelle Pauley said. “The building is just is a building. It just shows that the club is not just a building but what we make of it.”
But the loss of its home hasn’t put a damper on the Boys & Girls Club’s largest annual fundraiser, Steak and Burger.
The annual event will be held this year at World Outreach Church in the New Harvest Sanctuary on New Salem Highway.
BGC Chief Executive Officer Dan Jernigan said the event supplies most of the club’s daily operating funds for the year.
The Steak and Burger takes place at 5 p.m. Thursday, April 16.
At the event, tables for 10 will be set for eight adults and two children from the club. While the adults eat Toot’s burgers off of paper plates, the children will eat steak off of real plates.
Guests will also have the opportunity to bid on any of the items in the silent auction.
Sponsorships are available from $10,000 to $1,500 or individual tickets are available for $200.
All proceeds from the Steak & Burger Event will benefit the more than 1,700 children who are proud members of the Boys & Girls Clubs in Murfreesboro and Smyrna.
Bias will speak at the event, bringing her message of hope with her program, “The Best Is Yet To Come, for community, youth, family, and our schools.”
She focuses on the redemptive and transforming power of love and hope as a way to prevent youth violence and drug abuse.
Pauley said the hope and love the club has received from the community has been overwhelming and her “thank you” list gets longer by the day.
But more help is needed to overcome the storm. Send donations to the Boys & Girls Club can at P.O. Box 3343, Murfreesboro, TN 37133, visit bgcrc.net, or call 890-2582.
Tickets for the Steak and Burger can also be purchased over the phone or through the Web site.
“Now more than ever we need the community’s support,” she said. “Now more than ever our kids need a safe place, and that’s what we’re trying to give them. We need to fund the now.”
The club is making it now that it returned temporarily to the McFadden Community Center on Monday. The club used the building from 1989 through 1996, when it moved to its current location on Jones Boulevard on Dec. 2, 1996.
Jernigan said the club sustained more than $1 million worth of damage and it could take three months to complete repairs.
The kids at the club are adjusting to the new location well, Pauley said.
The tornado hasn’t damped the spirits of the kids, either.
Marqua Gant, 13, said he doesn’t care where the club is as long as it’s somewhere. He said it was hard moving to the new place, because he was used to the old one. But as long as there’s a basketball court he’s happy.
“And my friends are still there,” he said.
Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com. |
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