The regional nonprofit EveryChild has launched a $650,000 public fundraising campaign, to complete a $2.7-million project to purchase, renovate and relocate to its new facility in downtown Rock Island.
Formerly known as the Child Abuse Council, the nonprofit agency provides child abuse prevention, education, and treatment programs for children and families, and earlier this month moved into the former JTM Concepts building at 420 23rd St., Rock Island, after 11 years in downtown Moline at 524 15th St.
The building purchase cost $1.25 million, recently completed renovations (some exterior work remains) cost $1.2 million and campaign costs are $250,000.
With nearly 8,000 children and families served annually and growing demand for services, the new space will allow EveryChild to better provide prevention, education, and treatment programs in a safe, welcoming, and confidential environment. The new building also allows for future growth.
Over the past 10 years, the staff size has grown from 16 to 42 employees – from 2014 to 2024, EveryChild’s annual budget has tripled, from $1.2 million to $3.2 million, and number of clients served similarly jumped from 3,200 to 9,000.
“Childhood well-being is a community issue,” EveryChild president Nicole Mann said recently. “This new facility ensures that children and families across our region have access to early, evidence-based support when it matters most.”
The nonprofit staff moved in Feb. 12, and they will welcome clients next week.
“This building was in better shape than our current space, but it had a lot of open concepts,” Mann said Friday of the two-story, 13,000-square-foot building formerly owned by JTM Concepts.
“These offices did not exist down here. So we needed to create some cubicle space and some office space. But also because we've been growing so much, we didn't want to move into a building and then be at capacity right away. We have plenty of room to grow in this building as well.”
The former home in downtown Moline was 11,000 square feet, but staff was bursting at the seams, Mann said. She joined EveryChild in September 2023, after working for Scott County Kids, a granting agency that supports EveryChild.
This nonprofit serves Henry, Mercer and Rock Island counties in Illinois, and Scott, Cedar, Muscatine, Henry, Louisa, Des Moines and Lee counties in Iowa.
Since 2023, the main program growth has been in Healthy Families (increased by six staff); the Court Appointed Special Advocates (by one employee), and a new Moving Beyond Depression Therapy program, with a new therapist. All programs are available free of charge to the public.
“All programs are grant funded to an extent,” Mann said, noting the state of Illinois is a major funder, as well as federal funding, United Way of the Quad Cities, and QC Community Foundation. “And then we use fundraising to offset the deficits.”
Their major annual fundraising gala is Celebrate Every Child, which will be April 23 at Rhythm City Casino Event Center, Davenport.
Healthy Families serves families at risk or with more challenges, mainly serving new parents, said Brooke Hendrickx, VP of development and communications.
“They qualify for the programming based on a number of different reasons. It could be a young parent, could just be young, single parent income levels. And then those families get regular home visits,” she said. “We try to sign up families by the time kids or babies are three months old and those families get regular home visits weekly. And then sometimes they graduate like monthly. And really it's just to help parents grow in confidence, answer questions about parenting.
“A lot of parents don't have support networks, so kind of being that support network,” she said. “And ultimately the goal is to reduce stress in the home, increase parenting confidence so that kids have that safe environment to grow up in.”
EveryChild had been in the Moline building since 2015, and considered renovating there; but adding on was not an option, Mann said.
Three building change options
“That space had three people to a cubicle. We didn't have a private entrance for clients,” she noted. “Everybody was coming in the same space, and you didn't have that privacy. So I started working with our board of directors pretty quickly after I started and said, we need to start looking at our building space.
And so we put together a facilities committee probably in March 2024, and we looked at what would it cost to renovate our current space, what would it cost to build new, and what would it cost to take over an already existing building and renovate it?
“So we did our due diligence, and we had a team go out and look at a lot of properties, and we found this one. Probably it was May 2024 when I walked through this building, and I knew right away when I walked in, like, this is going to be our future home,” Mann said of the JTM site, which was purchased in December 2024. (JTM downsized and moved to another downtown location, 100 19th Street, Suite 102, Rock Island.)
One down side to the Moline building also was there were no windows, and no ADA-compliant restrooms. The Rock Island building has lots of windows, high ceilings, and its own parking lot (which Moline did not). Renovating the old space was estimated at $3.5 million, Mann said.
Though the new site doesn’t have a lot more room, it’s laid out much better, she noted. EveryChild now has a break room, a small wellness room and will create an outdoor employee patio.
The extensive renovations not only created new offices, meeting spaces, and child therapy rooms, but new painting, lighting and carpeting.
“We can put people and use the space a little bit better. In the old building we had a lot of dead space,” Mann said. “You couldn't really do anything in it. You couldn't put cubicles in it just because of how it was structured. And we do have parking here. We have client parking and we have employee parking. We do have car seat techs that are on staff. We have a garage now where somebody needs help with their car seat, they can pull up to the garage and one of our staff can go out and help them install their car seat.”
The renovations in Rock Island started last August, and EveryChild hired Liz Gougeon as a new major gifts officer to lead the capital campaign; her job is permanent, to be in charge of fundraising.
Strong giving support
The agency has had 100% financial participation from its board and staff, and so far, many large individual donors have contributed, Mann said.
“We partnered with Bush Construction for the renovation, so they've helped us with the capital campaign. And some of those larger organizations, the banks have really stepped up,” she said. “We've received money from the Moline Regional Community Foundation. And Hubbell-Waterman is doing a match grant with us right now, which is huge. Anybody who donates, it basically doubles that donation.”
The public phase includes a $135,000 dollar-for-dollar challenge match from the Hubbell-Waterman Foundation, doubling the impact of community gifts.
They’ve been able to finish the renovations before the staff moved and the campaign is ongoing. They still need new signage in the exterior and will do landscaping in the spring. EveryChild added some of its signature yellow to part of the exterior, but the rest of the building will stay blue and white.
“It's very bright. It has to do with our logo, which we have yellow and blue, and we wanted people to drive by and say, that's EveryChild's building right there with that yellow wall,” Mann said.
The Moline building has a mural on the 6th Avenue exterior, and EveryChild may do something similar outside the new place.
“We're hoping to partner at some point with Quad City Arts, but we do have a spot kind of on the outside of our garage that would be a beautiful space for something,” Mann said, noting mural artist Sarah Robb (who led creation of the Moline painting) already was walked around the Rock Island location.
Therapy programs took about two weeks off during the building transition, but those programs where staff goes to family homes were uninterrupted.
“We are focusing more on individuals and businesses now, but I think, we've had great success with some of those applications that we've sought out funding for and some of them have invited us back,” Mann said. “If the fall cycle is open and they were not at that $2.7 million, we've definitely been invited to come back and apply again.”
Large conference rooms and training rooms allow their full staff to more easily meet together.
“The great thing about this building is anytime we had an all-staff meeting, I had to contact one of our other nonprofits and see if I could take over their space because we didn't have enough room to have all of our staff in the same building,” Mann said. “And now we have a conference room that's large enough for our all-staff meetings to occur that I don't have to go off site for meetings anymore.”
Prevent Child Abuse America projects that for every $50 spent to treat child abuse and neglect, only $1 is currently spent to prevent it. Because of that disparity, EveryChild invests its time and resources in evidence-based programs that prevent abuse before it occurs. Isolation and limited support can increase stressors at home which heightens the risk of child abuse and neglect.
The organization creates broad reaching programs and services that target marginalized populations who have additional risk factors. Its services increase connections in the community, build parenting confidence, and increase support to decrease isolation and stress.
“Isolation and limited support can heighten the risk of child abuse,” the agency website says.
EveryChild’s 2024-25 report notes that the QC saw 8,800 reports of child abuse in 2023. In the last fiscal year, they completed 1,029 home visits in the Healthy Families Program; reached 819 early childhood students and teachers with Second Step programming; impacted 4,148 people through classes, presentations and training; and provided play therapy to 294 children and parents, in 1,384 therapy hours.
The new campaign will conclude this spring with a community ribbon-cutting celebration. For more information about the campaign, visit www.foreverychild.org/campaign.
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