‘Love can change the world’

Roughly 300 people trekked through the snow Saturday evening and into the Phillips County Event Center, where 44 tables and fellow residents packed the room for A Caring Pregnancy Resource Center’s annual fundraiser. Based on initial estimates, the Holyoke event raised about $46,000 in ticket sales, pledges, table sponsorships and donations.

This year’s banquet held an environment of mutual encouragement. With guest speaker Amy Ford, a former teen mom out of Dallas, Texas, providing her personal testimony, attendees were called to the organization’s aid. The Resource Center’s efforts to care for mothers and fathers in need, its Executive Director Roberta Bigalk said, are “far from over.”

Capturing the audience’s attention with her testimony, Ford expressed that pregnancy resource centers – like the one found in Holyoke – are crucial “to people that are hurting and scared for their future.” Now the co-founder and president of Embrace Grace, a non-profit designed to help churches “love on pregnant young women and their families,” Ford remembered her time as a teenage girl feeling alone, ashamed and uncomfortable at church. She shared a poignant statistic, researched by the Guttmacher Institute: One in four women have had an abortion, whether they be churchgoers or not.

Before banquet attendees enjoyed the food provided by At Ease BBQ, Seaboard and Lenz Farms, Pastor Al Smith from First Baptist Church blessed the meal with a prayer. Even with dozens of different tables and sponsors, attendees moved easily from one table to the next to welcome one another.

Through Ford’s work, her website at www.amyford.com states, she hopes to “make the church one of the first places a young woman runs to instead of the last because of shame and guilt.”

The Resource Center’s mission, according to Bigalk, is “to provide accurate information, resources and support to individuals facing pregnancy in Northeast Colorado.” 

“We used to say ‘unplanned pregnancies,’ but there are many people who actually have planned pregnancies,” she said, “and they don’t know how to navigate parenting...they don’t have the equipment they need to take care of their babies.”

To help new families and individuals on their journeys, she continued, the organization offers a “lending closet” with clothing “up to 2T of age”; diapers and formula; and Pack N’ Plays, mobile cribs that allow a place for babies to play and sleep. It also provides information on the risks associated with abortions, as well as free ultrasounds, and free testing for pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

She noted, in addition, the organization offers support groups for post-abortion recovery where those who took that path may “process the choice they made.”

“We want to support our young women and our young men,” she said. “We have a lot of young men who come in and say things like, ‘I’d like to be a better dad than my dad, but I don’t know how to do that.”

Holyoke’s A Caring Pregnancy Resource Center alone has extended its arms to 17 new clients, providing two ultrasounds and care for three babies.

After Ford left the stage, one of those babies was featured in a recorded testimony, while the mother shared her gratitude for the care she received.

“They had been there for me with everything that I needed,” she said, as her baby cooed in the background. “They helped me with a carseat, they provided me with a bed… and whatever else I needed.”

Bigalk put forth a call to action, saying, “In order to do these programs, we need you.” Thus, an auction began that she deemed “Raise the Paddle,” a system of giving money where people would pledge using the numbers upon their programs. After the auction, singers Susan Baker and Kala Yost, and guitarist Emmy Brown instrumentalized the song, “Rise Up (Lazarus)” by Cain.

“Love,” Ford said, “can change the world.”

Fundraising banquets for A Caring Pregnancy Resource Center continued in Colorado through the week with one on Sunday at First Church of the Nazarene in Yuma and another Monday at Morgan County Event Center in Fort Morgan. A day before the Holyoke event, Trinity Lutheran Church hosted a fundraiser in Sterling, Colorado. Overall, Bigalk said, events thus far have raised an estimated $175,000.

For more information about the Caring Pregnancy Resource Center, contact the main office in Brush, Colorado, at (970) 842-4324.