Construction begins on organization's new home

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Ozarks is building a new facility, with a little help from its friends.
A donation by Springfield residents Dick and Anise Pendleton, Susan Boswell and John Heitz will fund a new 3,000-square-foot facility, the John P. “Jack” Heitz Center. Ground was broken March 18 for the project, which is scheduled for completion by fall 2005.
“For so many years we have been in a facility that has accommodated our needs but has not given us the opportunity to provide additional services and additional activities for our bigs and littles,” said Board President Barby Pohl.
The new facility includes outdoor space and will provide much-needed elbow room for staff.
“As it is, we work with 500 to 600 children annually. This gives us the chance to work with twice as many kids. We will have that much more room to add staff,” said Executive Director Lisa Slavens.
She added that the new space will help the organization train its volunteers more efficiently. “We do a lot of training with our mentors. We do training on how to watch for sexual and physical abuse. It has had to be a lot of one-on-one. This will give us the opportunity to do mass trainings. All of our mentoring work is done off-site, but we make our matches here and we support our matches here,” Slavens said.
The new center more than doubles the organixation’s 1,250-square-foot location in the Spring Valley Shopping Center, 1675 E. Seminole, Ste. J. Butler Rosenbury and Partners designed the facility and MoDoCo Inc. is the general contractor.

The donation
Heitz, the Pendletons and Boswell made an undisclosed cash donation and donated a long-term lease to the land at 3372 W. Battlefield.
“Some years ago we bought a tract of ground on West Battlefield across from Carver Middle School. We developed that ground but left commercial ground up front. We thought that we would probably do something with it some day, we would either sell it or we would find some use to develop the property,” Heitz said.
The donation “was really Dick Pendleton’s idea,” Heitz added. “The city of Springfield has been so good to us; we have all grown up here and made our livings here, so we wanted to do something to give something back to the city and to the people that live in Springfield.”
The group chose BBBS, a United Way agency, because of an acquaintance with Morris Dock, a member of the BBBS Board of Directors and an active proponent of the organization. Dock also is head of MoDoCo Inc.
The facility will be named after John Heitz’s father, John P. Heitz. The senior Heitz, now deceased, was a close friend of the Pendletons.
“Dick and Anise Pendleton were very close to my father, and Dick just made the comment in one of the meetings that we would be interested in making a cash donation, leasing the ground to them and helping them get financing if they would name the building after my dad. It was a shock to me, but I was very much honored that BBBS agreed to it and humbled that Dick thought enough of my dad that he wanted to do that,” Heitz said.

Tax credits
Another windfall for BBBS came in the form of Youth Opportunity Tax Credits. “We’ve been given $217,000 in Tax Credits which we can leverage into $434,000,” Slavens said. Along with the donation of money and land from Heitz, Boswell and the Pendletons, the tax credits could allow BBBS to come out debt-free.
“With youth opportunity tax credits, you have to find donors who are willing to give you the money so you can get back the tax credits. They give the donor a chance to take 50 percent of what they donate right off of the top of their tax liability to the state,” Slavens said.
“They can donate in cash, they can donate in stocks, they can donate in supplies; there are a lot of ways for them to affect the bottom line of this building without them affecting their own bottom line,” she said.
Dick Pendleton said that while the tax credits were not a motivation for making a donation to BBBS, the credits enabled them to give more.
“For a lot of people, it’s an incentive to give at all,” he said. “We were already going to give the money, but through the credits we decided to give more.”

New programs
These tax credits will allow BBBS to provide additional programming to area children.
“All of the money that we raise goes directly back to what we do,” Slavens said.
BBBS will add two new programs, she said: Mealtime Buddies and Mentoring Children of Incarcerated Parents.
Mealtime Buddies matches children at Boys and Girls’ Club with an adult who goes and has dinner with them and just spends an hour shooting hoops or doing homework.
Through Mentoring Children of Incarcerated Parents, Slavens hopes to keep children from repeating the mistakes of their parents.
There are more than 300 children in three ZIP codes in the Springfield metro area whose parents are incarcerated, Slavens added.
“A child whose parent is incarcerated is seven times more likely to end up in prison,” Slavens said. “We’re really looking forward to being able to implement that program.”
Slavens hopes that the increased visibility from the new facility will be a boon to the organization.
“We are always looking for more volunteers; this just helps us get the word out even more. This gives them a great place to start volunteering for us. I think we will be able to make great strides,” she said.