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August 26 2009 | Events and Fundraising | No Comments »
On April 15, 2012, during National Volunteer Week, Not-For-Profit Resources will host the 2nd annual McHenry County Human Race. This is a unique event which benefits charity organizations serving McHenry County including Turning Point.
The 5K walk/run will take place in McHenry’s Corporate Park on Corporate Dr. Walkers/runners will gather donations/pledges to support their desired charity or simply participate in the event. All ages are welcome to come out and join the community in supporting volunteerism! For more information, visit the website. To make a donation, visit our Team Page.
Thank you to the volunteers who have signed up to run:
| Ginger Imes |
| Nathanael Patterson |
| Ann Esarco |
| Mary Anne Weltch |
| Richard Lemberger |
| Michele Lemberger |
December 27 2011 | Events and Fundraising and Volunteers | No Comments »
The Turning Point Auction is starting to come together! Always a fun night, this year we will be gathering at the Crystal Lake Country Club on April 20th. The evening kicks off with a cash bar and silent auctions at 6:30, with dinner served at 7:30 and the always-exciting Live Auction to follow.
Of course, this evening is made possible by the generous support of local businesses and communitry groups. We will be listing these good folks here- please be sure to support our sponsors.
Thank you to our item donors:
| Georgio’s Pizza |
| Sherman Mechanical |
| Algonquin-Lith Fire Protection District |
| Popeye’s |
| Lou Malnati’s |
| Village Squire |
| E.W. Training |
| Target |
| Volo Auto Museum |
| Cary Country Club |
| Popeye’s |
| Gino’s east |
| Dancing Horses Theater |
| Port Edward |
| Chuck’s Lakeshore Inn |
| Adventure Stage Chicago |
| Timeline Theater |
| Northlight Theater |
| Ten Chimneys |
| Grand Geneva Resort |
| Woodhouse Day Spa |
| Bjorkman’s Ace Hardware |
| Zukowski, Rogers, Flood & McArdle |
| Plum Tree National |
January 10 2012 | Events and Fundraising | No Comments »
A fascinating article about hunger in America comes to us from Huffington Post:
“I joined Tyson, a public health professional, at a Las Vegas food distribution point at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, January 25. She explained the situation as we unpacked loaves of bread from large crates outside of Living Faith Assembly. The weather was cold, about 50 degrees. To the right of us an estimated 200-250 people in hoodies, including women with children, stood in line.
Tyson said that they start lining up at 5 a.m. because they are afraid that some items would run out. This week, there was not enough meat.
“At the beginning of the month, when food stamps are distributed, we usually have less than 200 people. By the end of the month, it is higher,” she explained.
Nevada still suffers from the highest unemployment rate in the nation — 12.6% as of December 2011. It also has the highest foreclosure rate. According to Three Square, one in six Southern Nevada homes are “food insecure,” meaning hungry.
This is not limited to Las Vegas’s poorer areas. Tyson says that Summerlin, an affluent neighborhood west of the Strip, has 14% reported food insecurity. She is careful to say, “reported.”
“These upper-middle class areas were not designed to have food distribution points. No one ever thought they would be needed,” she explains. ….
To demonstrate the every day reality for SNAP recipients, Three Square recently held a public, participatory, SNAP experiment. Volunteers in Southern Nevada willingly lived for a week on a budget of $4.06 a day, for food — the average daily benefit for a single person on food stamps. That amount goes down to $3.93 in a two-person household; $3.63 in a three-person household; and $3.39 each in a family of four or more. They were given a budget and sample shopping lists, and asked to report their experiences in a blog on Three Square’s website. Among the 100 participating households were those of Mayor Carolyn Goodman and Assemblywoman April Mastroluca. Two Three Square participants were Jodi Tyson and Three Square COO John Livingston.
A SNAP participant identified as “Tess” mentioned the cost of milk in her SNAP Experience Blog entry: “I had to opt for a small container of milk to integrate a bag of greens and a couple of pears into our diet.
February 02 2012 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Volunteer Tom Erwin is a wonder! He’s been volunteering at Turning Point for so long- and so regularly- that it’s hard not to take him for granted! Except he does so much- so well!- that we can’t! Tom is our handy-man-jack-of-all-trades, changing light bulbs, emptying trash cans, fixing light switches- you name it, Tom does it.
He’s nominated for “A Salute to Senior Service” Award for his volunteerism. PLEASE take a minute and read about Tom, and if you can, make a post thanking him for his hard work.
February 02 2012 | Volunteers | 1 Comment »
Another reason to make Woodstock Willie America’s national prognosticator! From today’s Northwest Herald:
“The prognostication at the annual Groundhog Days festival was met with cheers from what event organizers called the largest crowd in its 20-year history.
That’s because Woodstock Willie didn’t see his shadow, meaning an early spring is headed this way.
Woodstock is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the filming of ‘Groundhog Day’ starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.
People from as far away as Oregon descended on the Square for the prognostication, one of many groundhog-themed events taking place in downtown Woodstock through Sunday.
“I think it’s the largest crowd in Groundhog Days history largely because the beautiful weather were having,” Mayor Brian Sager said. “And this is the 20th anniversary so there are of a lot of people that want to take part in the celebration.”
Across the country, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his lair and saw his shadow today, in the process predicting six more weeks of winter.
The groundhog made his prediction on Gobbler’s Knob, a tiny hill in the town for which he’s named about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
Temperatures were near freezing when he emerged at dawn — unseasonably warm — and were forecast to climb into the mid-40s in a winter that’s brought little snow and only a few notably cold days to much of the East.”
February 02 2012 | In the news | No Comments »
A letter to the Editor in today’s Northwest Herald:
To the Editor:
There is so much bad news in the newspaper these days that I wanted to share some good news.
This holiday season, our communities were so amazing in their holiday giving! Churches, businesses, organizations, individuals, all came forward and offered to volunteer to provide Christmas gifts to those in need.
Turning Point is McHenry County’s only comprehensive domestic violence agency and shelter, and these gifts helped make those fleeing family violence have a happier holiday. It truly was wonderful, and I am grateful to live in such a giving community. On behalf of the 1,970 women, children and men who used services last year alone, I thank you.
Jane Farmer
Executive director, Turning Point
February 02 2012 | In the news and Volunteers | No Comments »
Nicole Hollander (1939 - )
Nicole Hollander was born and raised in Chicago. Her parents were labor activists. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois and was briefly married to Hungarian Sociologist Paul Hollander before divorcing and earning an MFA from Boston University in 1966. She set out in a career as a graphic artist.
She worked as the designer of a feminist magazine in the 1970’s and occasionally drew illustrations or comics to accompany an article. In about 1976, she began drawing a regular strip for the magazine that she called “Feminist Follies.” Those strips grew into a calendar (“Witches, Pigs and Fairy Godmothers”) and a book “I’m Training to be Tall and Blonde.” Nicole often drew an outspoken woman who commented on current events and her adventures with her cats, among other topics.
In 1981, Field Enterprise offered to distribute the column nationwide. The comic was renamed “Sylvia” after that outspoken central character. Nicole spun off the Sylvia character into greeting cards, calendars, refrigerator magnets and more. Wherever she turned up, Sylvia is still very outspoken and still comments on whatever catches her eye. As Barbara Ehrenreich observed “What working commentator can confront Sylvia’s range of subject matter—from macro-economics to stretch marks, from foreign policy to kitty litter—without gnawing anxiously on his or her writing instrument?… her supernatural insight into matters of public policy, her ability to see, as with x-ray vision, through the stupefying drone of media rhetoric.”
She is not universally beloved; as is often the case, not everyone appreciates outspoken women. When they poll the readership on which comics to carry, newspapers often find their readership passionately divided between pro-Sylvia and anti-Sylvia forces. After a referendum between two comics strips, the Providence Journal reported: “Many [respondents to a reader survey] who voted for Mr. Boffo did so simply to vote against Sylvia. Several claimed they would have voted for a blank space. Their message: Get rid of Sylvia.”
But Sylvia is here to stay. The strip still appears in a number of daily papers, but is most readily available on-line at Nicole’s website, a format that allows the always topical artist to comment on events of the day- sometimes even the same day! 19 collections of Sylvia comics have been published and Nicole has adapted the strip for stage plays and musicals. She’s also become something of an authority on women’s humor, curating a show of women’s humor for Chicago’s Women Made gallery. In addition to her Sylvia projects, Nicole has provided illustrations for a variety of publications, and has written and published books about cats. Appropriately, she received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for Women of Achievement over 40.
Currently, Nicole is enjoying a two-week residency at the Ragdale artist colony in Lake Forest, where she is drawing and writing autobiographical strips that may serve as the basis for a memoir. She wrote about the experience for the Chicago Tribune: “I made the decision to concentrate on scenes from my childhood that involved movement. My cartoon strips are normally static and wordy, drawn with a fine sharpie and a medium Rotring technical pen.
In the running story of my childhood, I sit for a moment thinking of what part of the story to tell next, and then I draw like mad. My back is killing me.”
February 01 2012 | Extraordinary Women | No Comments »
The Daily Beast website has a first-person account of child abuse. It’s harrowing, but has much to teach us:
“My earliest memory of the physical punishment is from when I was 5 or 6 years old, in the early 1980s. We were living in a modest house in the city of Perth, Australia. My mom was a single mother, unemployed at the time. I had a younger brother, and no father—he had disappeared before I was born. On this day, I had done something to anger my mother—I can’t remember what—and she grabbed a wooden mixing spoon from the kitchen and spanked me so hard, the spoon broke. “You drive me crazy!” she yelled. The shock and pain left me feeling ashamed, confused. Other punishments would follow: the occasional whipping with an electric cord, a beating with a broomstick. These punishments were random, inexplicable. Maybe she didn’t like that I’d made noise playing in the yard, or that I’d interrupted her while she was eating something in the kitchen. I couldn’t do anything right, but I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. I wanted to be good, to make her love me. Even then, I could sense that she didn’t.”
January 31 2012 | In the news | No Comments »
From today’s Northwest Herald: Turning Point is a grateful recipient of funding from the Mental Health Resource League.
To the Editor:
On Monday, Jan. 23, the Mental Health Resource League for McHenry County held its 46th annual meeting and awards ceremony at the Stage Left Café on the Woodstock Square. More than $207,000 was awarded to 20 McHenry County nonprofit agencies.
The grants allocated at the annual meeting are raised during the Fair and Fall Diddley craft shows held respectively on the Woodstock Square in May and at the Boone County Fairgrounds in October.
Listening to each of the agencies relate how they will spend these dollars is an uplifting and inspiring occasion. In the current economy where we find state, federal and private funding declining, these agencies are doing everything in their power to stretch every cent out of their fundraising dollars to provide the help and assistance those with mental health issues in McHenry County need.
The all-volunteer board of MHRL thanks the grant recipients for their commitment to our county. The league is extremely proud of its partnership with each of these agencies. In its 46-year history, MHRL has awarded more than $4.4 million.
And while the league certainly is proud of this accomplishment, we all look forward to the day when public understanding and acceptance of mental health issues becomes a reality.
Russell Foszcz
Richmond
January 31 2012 | In the news and Programs | No Comments »
Thanks to Denny & Carolyn Mahoney for sending us this story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online:
Jennifer Chaudoir knew all too well what she was running from.
It took her many miles to learn what she was running to.
Block by block, she ran to strength, confidence, freedom from two abusive marriages, happiness, and to victory.
Fitness Edge recently named the mother of five from Green Bay its 2011 athlete of the year. The award recognized her for 31 outright or age group wins over the year, and for the ordeal that made being an elite runner unfathomable to her for more than a decade.
Chaudoir suffered physical and emotional abuse during her first marriage, which lasted 10 years. Her second marriage was equally bad.
After becoming afraid to leave their baby alone with her husband, Chaudoir obtained a court-ordered restraining order against her husband. He was later convicted of violating the order, and they divorced in 2009.
Fighting for her safety and her sanity, Chaudoir’s path started with the early morning walks she took to find peace and answers.
“Walking turned to jogging and my jogging turned to running,” she said. “In order for me to get out of the situation, I needed to feel strong.”
A woman who lacked the confidence to pursue athletics during her darker times, found she had a talent for the sport, first in the 2006 Cellcom Green Bay Half Marathon, then in dozens of races.
Chaudoir, 37, finished fourth last year in the Community First Fox Cities Marathon, in a time of 3:04:26, finished second in the 2011 Icebreaker Indoor Half Marathon and first in the 2012 Icebreaker 5K.
The medals she earned are inconsequential compared to the bigger prizes she’s attained.
“I found that I felt if I could run through struggles to finish two miles when I used to only make it two blocks that I could do almost anything I put my mind and my heart into,” she said “It also gave me little pieces of me back.
“I lost the real Jenny in trying to find ways to cope and trying so hard to please and keep peace. In my running I found the feeling of the freedom I so desired, and regained some confidence that had been pulled away from me.
“I regained passion for life and what can be in life instead of trying to keep everything even keeled. The confidence made me strong enough to get through life’s trials feeling strong and I began to succeed with many more accomplishments I never dreamed of.”
Some may envy Chaudoir’s speed and athletic frame, without appreciating the energy she invests in her training and her family. She’s worked as a waitress, cleans houses and recently started her own personal training business.
She juggles her work schedule and training with time for her children, ages 14, 12, 11, 9 and 3.
Fitness Edge, part of Global Bottling Partners based in Neenah, has been a helpful sponsor, and added a confidence boost through its athlete of the year award.
According to Global Bottling Partners President Mark Gottsacker, the award winner is honored for outstanding commitment in achieving personal athletic goals, despite obstacles.
“Jennifer maintains a vigorous training schedule, has overcome several health issues and has a successful personal training business,” Gottsacker said. “I can think of no better person to be awarded the Fitness Edge athlete of the year.”
Chaudoir has started 2012 running to new goals.
On Thursday, she ran nearly 30 miles from her home to the Golden House shelter for victims of abuse; then on to the chapel she visited at the start of her journey.
“My exact moves seven years ago when I needed help,” she said.
She ran this time to raise money for the shelter, and to give the strength she found to others.
“I’m hoping to inspire other women who think that they can’t believe that they can, with all aspects of life,” Chaudoir said. “If I can make a difference for someone else, that will be my reward.”
January 30 2012 | In the news | No Comments »
Volunteer and Become a Domestic Violence Advocate
Register now for the 40 Hour Training Program in domestic violence presented by Turning Point and approved by the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence (ICADV). Then train to answer calls on our 24 hour crisis line. Please see the attached registration form for more information.
Thank you!
Jennifer Kenning
Turning Point, Inc.
Training and Volunteer Coordinator
(815)338 - 8081 x262
January 27 2012 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Melissa McGraw, our Partner Abuse Intervention Program coordinator, passed along this article. As Melissa can tell you, she hears a LOT of implausible excuses from abusers but this one may well take the cake.
“A Wisconsin man, who claimed a ghost beat his wife, was arrested Sunday. Michael West told Fond du Lac police officers that an apparition was responsible for the brutal assault on his wife Rebecca West, not him.
On January 18, 2012, police responded to an emergency 911 call to the residence of Michael and Rebecca West. Upon arrival, police met with the woman, who claimed that her husband had attacked her without provocation.
According to a report from the Christian Post, responding officers observed that the woman was bleeding from her mouth, and had abrasions and other bruises all about her body. They also noted that blood droplets were all around the residence and on the woman’s clothing.
When police questioned Michael West, 41, he initially said that the woman had fallen outside. However, when police prodded him more on the injuries of his wife, he said “a ghost did it.”"
January 24 2012 | In the news | No Comments »
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