Mia Wade, with the Greer Centennial Lions Club, presented Caroline Robertson, Executive Director of Greer Relief, with a $500 check during Friday’s luncheon and nonprofit showcase.Marketing Coordinator Krista Gibson and Executive Director Don Kauffman shared about Greer Community Ministries’ services with a musical performances.

Greer chamber spotlights 12 local nonprofits

Kaelyn Cashman's picture
At monthly luncheon
By: 
Kaelyn Cashman

The holiday season is here and the list of needs for local nonprofits is growing.

The Greater Greer Chamber of Commerce put the spotlight on 12 local agencies last Friday during its monthly luncheon.

“The reason we celebrate this time of year is because God so loved the world that He gave,” said Mark King, owner of King Consulting. “God is a Giver, and that’s why we celebrate this time of year, and one of the things we do to celebrate is to give.”

Featured nonprofits at the event included: the Greer Cultural Arts Council, Greer Community Ministries, Foothills Philharmonic, Child Evangelism Fellowship, the Greer Cintennial Lions Club, Piedmont Women’s Center, Junior Achievement, American Cancer Society, Greer Relief, Leadership Greer, New Horizon Family Services and Power Kids Fitness.

Greer Cultural Arts Council
The Greer Cultural Arts Council hosted its inaugural Gingerbread Jamboree last Thursday night at the newly renovated Center for the Arts on Trade Street.
“We’re offering classes,” said Robin Byouk, Cultural Arts Supervisor. “We have a beautiful auditorium and an art gallery.
“The Greer Cultural Arts Council’s mission is to provide affordable arts programming for the greater Greer community,” she said. “We partner with the city, and we do art shows, tunes in the park. We do kids camps.”
The Greer Children’s Theatre’s mission is to provide a needed resource to local children.
“Ninety percent of our cast is children,” Byouk said. “We want to get children up in front of audiences.”
Beauty and the Beast just concluded, and tickets are on sale for Frozen in March at the Bonds Career Center.

Foothills Philharmonic
Evan Duke shared about Foothills Philharmonic, which has been in existence since 2000 and in Greer since 2011.
“All our concerts are free in general admission,” Duke said. “It’s a part of our being able to give back.
“Educate, enrich and entertain is our vision statement,” he said. “For educate, we have a future stars scholarship, which is a competition that is high school students. We have our first competition winner that is going to be soling this upcoming March.”
Foothills also has a clinician program and an instrument petting zoo.
“For the enrichment part, we have an arts sale; we have a toys for tots drive; we have a sensory friendly concert,” Duke said. “This past November, we actually worked with GCM for a food drive.”
“For the entertainment, we have three master works concerts, three pops concerts, a Christmas concert that’s upcoming here shortly as well as five chamber concerts,” he said.
Foothills is looking for anyone who can play an instrument or help by volunteering.
For more information, visit foothillsphilharmonic.org.

Child Evangelism Fellowship
Good News Club is the world’s largest ministry to children of the elementary school age and is in every country in the world, except North Korea.
“I had not asked my group of fifth graders if any of them had need of a Bible, and three of them said they did,” said Paul Mullen, Director of Stewardship.
Mullen helped them to get Bibles and aided one girl who hugged the Bible to find Genesis by using the index.
“Good News Club is the beginning for most of them of their spiritual journey; many of them come to a saving knowledge of Christ and then they begin to grow in Him,” Mullen said. “I’m a grandfather now and have been for several years.”
“It’s fun for me to sit around a table of children and know that with a grandfather’s heart I get to minister to these children and see them walk their spiritual journey, come to Christ and learn to love,” he said.
For more information, visit www.cefonline.com.

Greer Centennial Lions Club
Mia Wade with Greer Centennial Lions Club shared a lesson she learned this year.
“I was sharing with one of the directors of one of these wonderful organizations, and I found myself saying to them that I felt overwhelmed,” Wade said. “I could see in their face that they’re thinking, you do not have a clue.”
“In my heart, I realized that; I really didn’t have a clue what overwhelmed means,” she said. “The organizations, especially this time of year, those folks that are staffing and running those organizations are at that point in time where the avalanche is real, and they’re feeling the results of their efforts.”
The Greer Centennial Lions Club often helps to fill the gap by raising funds and assisting these organizations as well as running their own programs.
Wade presented a $500 check to Caroline Robertson with Greer Relief.
For more information, visit e-clubhouse.org/sites/greer100 or Greer Centennial Lions Club on Facebook.

Piedmont Women’s Center
Piedmont Women’s Center is a faith-based nonprofit existing to educate, equip and empower the Upstate of South Carolina to choose life and to change lives.
“Not just to choose life for an unborn child but really to choose life in Christ,” said CEO Kelly Ross, “The way that we accomplish our mission is by providing a pathway of hope. We live in a culture that for the most part feels pretty hopeless. When you’re hopeless and you’re pregnant, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of options for you.”
“But here’s what we really believe with all of our heart, if you’re pregnant and you need help, we should help you,” she said, “and if we help you and you make a life decision, then that decision that you make for life, that life decision deserves life support.”
PWC provides free women’s health care services, including pregnancy testing, OB ultrasounds, pap smears, and STD testing.
“All of these things are done for a simple purpose, and that’s to help people make the very best decision for their life,” Ross said. “Over the last 20 years in the communities of Greenville and Spartanburg, more than 20,000 people have lost their lives through abortion; that’s citizens right here in Greer that no longer exist because of a choice that they made.
“We hope you’ll join us in helping people make the very best choice for their lives,” she said.
For more information, visit piedmontwomenscenter.org.

Junior Achievement
Junior Achievement is celebrating its centennial year.
“One in three Americans has debt in collections,” said Sonia McAbee, Development Manager. “Employers say that 40 percent of graduates lack the 21st Century skills to succeed at work; new business failures out pace new business creations.”
“Kids who drop out of school say that their life is not relevant and that no one really cares and that they can’t do it,” she said. “Too many kids are answering the questions now with I can’t; we are re-engineering education to be more relevant. We are connecting kids with real role models.”
McAbee shared some statistics.
“JA alumni are 30 percent more likely to have a bachelor’s degree, 67 percent more likely to have an advanced degree and 143 percent more likely to start their own business,” McAbee said. “20 JA alumni are higher in pay than their peers.
“Our programs are empowering our generation from I can’t to I can, so let’s make it another great 100 years,” she said.
For more information, visit www.juniorachievement.org/web/ja-usa/home.

American Cancer Society
The American Cancer Society is launched a new event in May 2020 called, Stick a Fork in Cancer, to honor local cancer survivors.
“We are recruiting local restaurants to come in and join together and showcase their food and we’ll have entertainment; we’ll have a silent auction,” said Casey Eller, Community Development Manager.
The event will be held at Greer City Hall and Park.
“We’re very excited about that,” Eller said. “All the funds that will be raised through this event will be going towards our programs and services.”
The 106-year-old institution is behind most of the cancer breakthroughs and has spent $4.9 billion in research camps with dozens of Nobel prize winners.
“In addition to research, we offer support to survivors,” said Sharon Johnson, Mission Delivery Staff Partner. “We provide services to give them access to treatment.”
“We provide free hotel rooms if they have to go out of town for treatment,” she said. “We provide free rides to treatment. They pick them up from their home and deliver them to their treatments and then return them home again. This is offered nationwide.”
For more information, visit www.cancer.org.

Greer Relief & Resources Agency
Greer Relief just hosted the annual Christmas Parade on Sunday and cut the ribbon on the Christmas Morning Shoppe for neighbors in need.
“We’ve been around for 83 years, providing safety and stability to our neighbors in need,” said Executive Director Carolina Robertson. “We are even empowering our neighbors now with next step programs to help meet the need, answer the crisis, then take them to the next step.”
The Christmas Morning Shoppe opened Monday at the Greer First Baptist gym.
“Our neighbors’ families shop there,” Robertson said. “This alleviates the pressure of Christmas so that they’re not having to shop for Christmas and spend the money that they already do not have. We answer that need, so they can meet the needs of their family.”
“Generosity is definitely something that this community is good at and definitely keep on giving,” she said. “There’s wonderful organizations in this room.”

Leadership Greer & Daily Bread Ministries
Mindy Calvert with CresCom Bank in this year’s Leadership Greer Class 40 announced the class project.
“Leadership class 40—the best yet—has chosen for our project, home of the homelessness,” Calvert said. “We have a lot of homelessness is a lot of our communities.”
Class 40 has a goal to raise $20,000 to construct and furnish one of five tiny homes to be built on the Greer Soup Kitchen property.
“This project is located adjacent from the Greer Soup Kitchen and will be a part of the STEP program, strive to empower people, which is associated with the Daily Bread Ministries,” Calvert said.
“We look forward to our entire Greer community, all of you, to join us in making this happen,” she said.
For more information, visit www.greerchamber.com/leadership-greer.

New Horizon Family Health Services
New Horizon Family Health Services is recognized as a federally qualified health center and is a community home medical practice
“As such, we’re able to provide quality, affordable, compassionate, patient-centered health care to improve the health of our communities regardless of the person’s insurance status or their level of income,” said Brandon Cook, who manages the healthcare for the homeless program at New Horizon.
“The people we see come from a diverse socio-economic background and help shape our organizational culture and direction as 51 percent of our board of directors are patients we serve in our communities,” he said.
As a medical practice, New Horizon has 250 employees who work with community partners to see 26,000 patients and conduct 100,000 medical, dental and health encounters each year. Three primary care sites are located in Greenville, Traveler’s Rest and Greer.
“All of them have an on site pharmacy,” Cook said. “We also have a mobile medical unit that goes out.”
“We’ve served the Greer community now for over 20 years,” he said.
For more information, visit www.newhorizonfhs.org.

Greer Community Ministries
Greer Community Ministries shared about its services with a musical performances from Marketing Coordinator Krista Gibson and Executive Director Don Kauffman.
The duo adapted the tunes of Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You to convey GCM’s current needs.
“I need food. I need clothes,” Gibson sang. “Do you have all those?”
“Yes, we have all those,” Kauffman said.
After a little more back and forth, Kauffman sang, “I’m glad to hear you say that you will come today. We’ve been here for many years. Please tell all your peers.”
For more information, visit www.gcminc.org.

Power Kids Fitness
Power Kids Fitness is a new nonprofit, which has been operating as such for about two years now.
“Our mission is to combat childhood obesity in our Upstate,” said Lisa Salas. “A hard fact that we need to talk about is we are now in the generation where we could out live our kids, and it is because of the way that they are living their life at such a young age.”
“In our school systems, we’re getting less and less physical education,” she said. “One in three in South Carolina are actually obese. South Carolina is the second highest in childhood obesity. Our goal is to bring the resources to change this statistics.”
Power Kids Fitness has a facility for kids to work out as well as a dietician and a psychologist on the board.
For more information, visit www.powerkidsfitness.com.

kaelyn@greercitizen.com | 877-2076

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