A Clark County nonprofit has been growing its services to meet the needs of young people in the community.
Quest Youth Development has programs ranging from mentoring, to education, to leadership and career development.
Now, the organization has its own location and is preparing to hold a fundraiser this Friday and Saturday.
WYSO's Jerry Kenney spoke with Julie Driskill, with Quest, to learn more.
This story has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Julie Driskill: In the past year, we have decided to rent a facility. All of our work at that point had been going to other places. We have been working in the juvenile detention center for Clark County, and I've done that for seven years. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I go for several hours and I work with students there, and then as they get out and are released, we try to implement, give them opportunity and continue to do leadership and just mental health [services] and different things with them to get them work with their families. And then we also work with Tecumseh High School. We go into the school and we do a program there where their students that are not meeting all of the graduation requirements.
And so we work with the Ohio Means Jobs Readiness Program and it's kind of an alternative educational approach to graduation. And the last two years, we've helped over 40 students get to graduation. And we're proud to be back there again.
But this spring gave us a new opportunity to rent a building in New Carlisle, and now we have a place where kids can come to us. We're not only working with kids, it's the families as well. And we do kind of a very holistic, wraparound approach. But the idea is to prevent and reduce, eliminate at risk behaviors and just help kids to be able to see a different vision. The nonprofit is registered here under Job Seekers Network, but really what we're doing is more than even finding employment or pointing kids to our direction. It's helping them understand who they are, where they even want to go and how they're going to get there. It's meant to inspire. It's meant to motivate and be a safe, fun place where you can begin to connect and dream about your future again.
Jerry Kenney: And tell me how you fulfill that mission logistically. What is your combination of staff and volunteers on a day to day basis?
Driskill: Yeah, I will tell you, we are a 100% volunteer organization. At this point, we were just getting to the place where we thought maybe we could have some salaries but once we got the opportunity to get the building, we were like we're just going to keep doing what we're doing because it's just too important. But we have about, I'd say, 15 to 20 solid volunteers that come in.
We are just launching now an afterschool program on a Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, and our target age is 12 to 25. We have a lot of older people that are coming to us with younger elementary age children that are needing help. And so we're going to expand.
Kenney: And to help with that expansion, you've got a fundraiser coming up, orrect?
Driskill: Well, we planned this as a fundraiser, but what we're finding is people, they don't have the extra funds. It's a lot to ask them to come and be a part of this but we believe so much in what we're doing, we ask a couple partners and we got some generous donations and we are now going to make this event free. So it's called the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and we have two different events - Friday, Oct. 21, is geared towards adults and it's going to be from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at our youth building and that's 200 Eastlake Avenue, New Carlisle. If you go to our website, there is a link and also our Facebook post that you can register. Now we are asking people to register for this because we have only a certain amount of seats and we can only prepare a certain amount of food that we have to know ahead of time to be able to do this. But the whole concept is, coming in on Friday night, and it's going to be like a friend-raiser and we're going to tell people about what we're doing. But it's going to be in a spirit of fun and we have all the characters from Alice in Wonderland that are going to be there interacting. We have comedians.
We chose the Alice in Wonderland theme because not only of the educational component of that, but it really embodies what we are trying to do with our kids. The idea of taking courage, of thinking outside the box, believing in impossible things.
And then on Oct. 26 we've got a three-hour event for families, for young people, and that's going to start at noon, and we are going to do a Trunk or Treat. Everybody can come and get extra candy from 12 to 1 p.m. and then from 1 to 3 p.m. we are going to do something very similar to what we did the night before, but it's more of kind of a scavenger hunt.
We know the kids are going to want to be active and so they're going to go to different stations and they're going to meet the different characters and be challenged to do different events and solve different riddles. And then at the end we will actually have a tea party where they will sit down with the Queen of Hearts and have some fun things and some giveaways and they're not going to want to miss it.
We were really thankful for our donors to be able to to do this.
Registration for the Mad Hatter Tea Party is available online.
