Difference Makers honors the Everyday Heroes of Wichita
In addition to the awards that will be presented on Feb. 22, the Difference Makers of Wichita program is also honoring a series of Everyday Heroes who are making a difference in the community. The five heroes honored this year all work with some of the community’s most at-risk populations — economically disadvantaged children, the working poor who need help feeding their families and those in jails and juvenile detention centers.
T.O.U.C.H Closet
When Benita Chaplin retired from a more than 30-year career in judicial court management, she wanted to find something meaningful to do.
She remembered that when she helped with her church’s homeless outreach ministry, she saw something that tugged at her heartstrings: “When you see parents, you see children.”
In 2018, Chaplin and her friend Sarah Demby co-founded T.O.U.C.H. Closet to help children with the most basic of clothing necessities: coats, shoes and underwear. The nonprofit’s acronym stands for touching others until change happens.
Chaplin and Demby, who share a grandchild, said they know from their own families how quickly children can outgrow clothing. They also know other families aren’t as blessed as theirs to be able to afford them, they said.
“People in need deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” Chaplin said. “Crisis has no respect of person. Loss of employment, divorce, death of a parent or fleeing an abusive situation can place a child in a crisis situation.”
In its first year, T.O.U.C.H. partnered with two Title I schools and now it works with four schools. Social workers and counselors at the partner schools can put in requests for items and T.O.U.C.H. Closet will fulfill the orders from its donations of new and gently used shoes and coats and new undergarments.
“Our goal is to serve all Title I schools in USD 259,” Chaplin said. Title I schools have a large number of economically disadvantaged children.
This academic year, it has fulfilled about 15 requests, with some requests being for multiple items. Chaplin said the organization will also accept requests from non-partner schools and “do our best to provide services if our inventory permits.”
Chaplin has always tried to help youth in need. Over the years, she and her husband have made their home a haven for youth — children whose caregiver died suddenly, a teen mom who was moving from house to house, a pregnant mother trying to escape a bad relationship and more.
“I have a heart for young people,” said Chaplin.
It’s a sentiment shared by Demby, who also has opened her home to family and friends.
“Kids are our passion,” said Demby, who just retired from a 30-year career working in the Wesley Medical Center laboratory. “They can’t help the situation they find themselves in so anything we can do to help a child does my heart good.”
The pair are working on holding the nonprofit’s first fundraiser in April to help further its mission.
Paxton’s Blessing Box
From a small child came a big idea: to provide easy access to food for neighbors and others in Wichita.
A few hours after hearing his mom, Maggie, tell him about a neat idea she saw on Facebook — providing curbside food boxes similar to Little Free Libraries — 6-year-old Paxton Burns asked, “Mom, can we put one of those in our front yard?”
“I thought, ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen? We turn it into a library if it doesn’t work,’” Maggie recalled.
Three years later, there are now 61 of the red blessing boxes all over the state. Forty are in Wichita, with the remainder being in surrounding communities, according to Maggie. There also is one in North Carolina, Paxton reminded her.
They are red, Paxton said, “because we love red.”
“It’s been growing, growing and growing,” said Maggie during a visit to a storeroom in St. John’s Episcopal Church, where additional food donations they collect are kept. For the first two years, the Burnses ran the operation out of their basement, but they eventually outgrew the space.
Quarterly food drives help stock the storeroom shelves with nonperishable items including ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, granola bars, canned vegetables, bottled water, packaged cracker snacks and more.
Individuals who are willing to host a box can put in a request and they will receive a kit to assemble the boxes, which measure 20-by-24-by-15 inches and have a single shelf in the middle.
Some of the boxes are in what are called food deserts, like Delano and Planeview, which lack neighborhood grocery stores.
“Originally, we thought we’d be helping people who are homeless but it’s the working poor … who are living paycheck to paycheck,” Maggie said of those who utilize the food in the boxes.
“The idea of food insecurity is much larger than we ever could have imagined. To be honest, we knew nothing about it. Fortunately, we have never had to worry where our next meal is coming from, but we are the lucky ones.”
“I think it’s pretty cool that we can help people who sometimes don’t have the stuff that we have,” said Paxton, 9. “It feels good when people are taking stuff from the boxes because we know it’s being used.”
Ben Grisamore
Since he has attended a church in downtown Wichita for more than six decades, Ben Grisamore has been very aware of the city’s homeless population.
Most of the city’s homeless can be found downtown because many of the agencies that provide help, including shelter and food, are located in the city’s center.
He wondered, though, if others knew of “the critical size of the homeless population,” said Grisamore, who along with his wife, Mary, attends First United Methodist Church, 330 N. Broadway.
More than 10 years ago, Grisamore and a group of men and women founded Advocates to End Chronic Homelessness. During that time, AECH worked with various agencies and government agencies to advocate for services and improve the homeless condition, he said. One such endeavor was working with Officer Nate Schwiethale and the Wichita Police Department when the WPD started its homeless outreach team.
The group also raised funds and held ice cream socials for the homeless. Every Dec. 22, the longest day of the year, AECH honors the homeless with an annual memorial service for those who have died.
About a year ago, AECH decided to phase out its advocacy efforts because the coordination of services for the homeless has improved significantly in the past decade and is now led by a local collaboration called Impact ICT (formerly the Wichita-Sedgwick County Continuum of Care), according to Grisamore.
Grisamore said much of his volunteer time now is spent on anther effort he started about a decade ago — that of working with inmates and parolees. As part of a Christian ministry to offenders, he visits inmates at the Hutchinson Corrections Facility and Sedgwick County Jail. He also is involved with Mentoring 4 Success, a statewide, community-based program that pairs those transitioning from incarceration with community mentors.
With Mentoring 4 Success, “we meet with parolees for six months or longer to assist their transition,” Grisamore explained. “Mentoring is a key tool our society can use to help to resist the hazards of drugs, promote family relationships and assist community agencies to provide solutions for many of life’s obstacles.”
On the day of his interview for this article, for example, Grisamore had just returned from taking a person he is mentoring to a doctor’s visit.
Grisamore got involved in both efforts as a result of his church’s involvement with the homeless and inmates. Every Sunday, First United Methodist holds a special Sunday school class for those transitioning from jail or who are in a work-release program.
“Faith is important to me and I feel we are called to serve where we can and help people who need it,” Grisamore said.
Carol Gorges
Carol Gorges still remembers her reaction the first time she visited the local Juvenile Detention Center. It was for a chapel service in 2014.
“I remember seeing their faces and thinking, ‘these kids are no different than any other kids that were at my own church,’” she said. Gorges had been volunteering with the youth ministry and parish school at her church, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, at the time.
In 2015, she started volunteering as a Bible study leader through Youth for Christ and St. Dismas Ministry to the Incarcerated programs through the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, visiting the Juvenile Detention Facility and the Sedgwick County Jail. In 2016, she also became an active mentor with the Mentoring 4 Success program, working with youth in the criminal justice system.
“People tend to judge these kids or think they’re not worth the effort. They focus on the punishment aspect,” said Gorges, who works full-time as a financial analyst in a local aircraft company
But for Gorges, they are worth the effort.
“They deserve to hear the same message about Jesus and the opportunities to succeed in life that any other kid does,” she said. “I feel there’s value in each of them and sometimes they have to be convinced of that, that they are worth it.”
As she’s worked with youth in detention and in jail, she’s realized that for many, there are underlying issues “as to why they act and react the way they do. A lot of it is that they need healing and I’m trying to play my part in that.
“Many of these kids do not have the stable family structure and financial, practical resources that many of us have been privileged to have grown up with. I work most closely with the girls and it became so clear very quickly that so many of them have been victims of human trafficking and sexual assault. I had no idea how prevalent those traumatic situations were for so many of our young girls. In addition, several have been revictimized by our system again by being charged with trafficking themselves, after enduring such trauma from being a victim.”
The rewards from her volunteer work come when she sees the young women she’s worked with turn their lives around.
“We have seen several young women graduate from high school, attend college and even attain honor roll status,” she said. ”Some have been able to have an impact on the lives of other young women as well, which is so beautiful to see.”
Juanita Ridge
As an advocate for children and a community activist, Juanita Ridge has been involved in numerous efforts to help those around her.
According to her calculations, she’s tallied more than 30,000 volunteer hours over the years for various grassroots projects, she said.
Two issues are currently getting her attention: how to positively correct children’s behavior in the classroom and helping to further criminal justice reform in Kansas.
Ridge has worked as a para-educator in the Wichita public schools district for the past 24 years. Recently, she started implementing what she calls her “Award-Winning Classrooms” project in the middle school classroom where she works. It’s a program she created to help students correct negative behavior and to reward good behavior.
“I wanted to invest more into correcting a child’s behavior rather than creating a paper trail of punishment,” she said. She finds ways to promote and encourage good behavior, like providing special treats for good behavior.
She’s also become involved with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice. According to the ACLU, the campaign is a nationwide, multi-year effort to reduce the U.S. jail and prison population by 50% and to combat racial disparities in the racial justice system.
Among the agenda issues of the Kansas coalition, Ridge said she’s particularly interested in the topic of improving services for reentry into society services and for keeping offenders from going back to prison. She said she has met with Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly about the issues of solitary confinement. Advocates of prison reform say that keeping prisoners in solitary confinement can lead to isolation issues and adversely affect an offender’s ability to reintegrate with the prison population and with society when they are released. With incarceration rates rising in Kansas, Gov. Kelly has called for prison reform in the state.
Ridge has also been a part of the Racial Profiling Citizens Advisory Board of Wichita. In 1991, she was recognized for her work in helping clean up the neighborhood along 21st Street — when she organized kids to pick up trash — as one of America’s “Thousand Points of Light,” a nationwide program that recognizes volunteerism.