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Events to Raise Funds, Awareness of Kids Place
By Rebecca Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
06:40PM / Thursday, October 16, 2014
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The Kids Place Board of Directors.

A previous Kids Place gala.

Silent auction at Kids Place gala.


Above, a homemade sign tells the story of what an important role Berkshire County Kids Place plays in the community. Left, the organization is set in a pretty building in Pittsfield that aims to be warm and welcoming to the children and families who need its services.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — On one of Laura Baran's first days working at Berkshire County Kids Place last year, she encountered a little girl carrying a spray bottle filled with glitter. 

The girl told her the bottle was a a special spray to "keep the monsters away."

Baran said she went home and cried, second-guessing her decision to leave the American Cancer Society to go to work at Kids Place, a 21-year-old nonprofit that offers free assistance to children subjected to violence as victims or as witnesses and to their non-offending family members.

"It was like, holy moly," Baran said, recalling the feeling of knowing that little girl had been victimized and needed the comfort of "monster spray."

But now, a year into her job as development and special events coordinator for Kids Place, Baran knows her job of helping to plan events and raise money for the organization helps keep it a place where children and families can go to heal.

Two of those events are happening in the next week.

First is a chili cook-off this Friday, Oct. 17, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at the Berkshire Hills Country Club in Pittsfield. This is an annual event put on by a group of Berkshire County Realtors called "REACT," the Real Estate Agents Charitable Taskforce; they pick a recipient of the funds raised at the event, and this year they chose Kids Place. The event features chili made by more than a dozen local restaurants, and the public gets to decide the winner. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for kids.

Then next Friday, Oct. 24, is the organization's annual gala, dubbed "Music and Memories," from 5 to 9:30 p.m. at the Crowne Plaza in Pittsfield. The event, which aims to be "business casual," features music by Berkshire County native Matt Cusson, dinner, a silent auction, awards and more. Information and tickets to both events are available online.

"We're kind of a gala without the really expensive gala," Baran said. Tickets are $75 each of $525 for a table of eight.

One of the aspects of the gala Baran said she is most excited about is display of quotes from some of the more than 350 children that Kids Place helped in the past year.

"We're really excited to have that for people to view," Baran said. "This will be a way for us to tell our story and touch these people."

And what is the story of Kids Place? Twenty-one years ago, the organization was created in the model of a similar one in Alabama, which had been started by a man who had seen how child victims were constantly "re-traumatized" by having to tell their story to police and lawyers and psychologists, over and over again.

"It was just so difficult," Baran said. "They would finally get the guts to tell somebody, then they would have to go and tell that story over and over."

Under this model, a child is interviewed once by a specially trained investigator.

"Now all the components come to the Kids Place," she said. "It's very comfortable."

They organization has five therapists and works very closely with the Berkshire County District Attorney's office, the Elizabeth Freeman Center and others to determine services to "get right on the path for healing." While intake is done in Pittsfield, therapy is offered in both North Adams and Great Barrington.

"The children and their families have been through enough," she said. "We don't want to make it harder on them."

And all of that costs money for the organization, which gets some state and federal funding as well as grants to continue to offer its services for free but is not an agency of the government. Fully one-third of its budget comes from fundraising and special events, like the two upcoming ones as well as other ones throughout the year, including two golf tournaments in September, a pasta dinner, road race and color fun run in the spring, and the Jimmy Bernardo Motorcycle Run in the July.

But in addition to making money, a main goal with these events is to let the general public know what Kids Place is - and that it's not a day care or children's art center or clothing store.

"Child abuse is a very real problem in Berkshire County," said Baran, who said Berkshire County has the highest reported rate of child abuse in any county in Massachusetts. "A lot of people don't know what the Kids Place is or what we do. We're really working hard to get the word out."

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