Butler County Bar Association Foundation helps organizations through grants
Any donation is always welcome, but the recent $15,000 award to the Victim Outreach Intervention Center from the Butler County Bar Association Foundation helped fill a big budget hole.
VOICe, along with Summit School, the Children’s Advocacy Center of Butler County, Alexandra’s Light of Hope and the Butler County Community College Education Foundation received the awards during a presentation July 24 at Vintage Coffeehouse, 209 S. Main St.
“The (Butler County Bar Association) Foundation is very important for a number of reasons. The first is that it provides a way for bar association lawyers to give back to the community. Without the community, the legal profession would not exist,” said Sean Gallagher, foundation vice chairperson.
Gallagher said the foundation also helps to dispel negative stereotypes surrounding the legal profession. Creating a positive experience benefits lawyers and the community and helps to dismantle negative preconceptions, he said.
The foundation has existed in various capacities since the 1980s, Gallagher said. It was formally established as a charitable affiliate of the association in 2015. Over the past nine years, the foundation has donated $216,200 to help the vulnerable members of the community, according to the organization.
The $15,000 from the foundation this year fills an especially large hole in VOICe’s budget, said its executive director Traci Veri. In existence for 50 years, VOICe is the sole provider of services for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes in Butler County.
“We’ve served 350 clients in just the past year,” Veri said. Clients are referred by social agencies, the court system, hospitals, police and sometimes by word-of-mouth.
“We recently lost some funding. This will allow us to keep proving the services we’ve always provided,” Veri said. “We’re very grateful for their support.”
The money will be used to fund VOICe’s legal department. “It provides legal assistance to victims of domestic violence in a variety of services including protection from abuse orders, child custody, child support and divorce,” Veri said. “Many would not be able to afford the legal representation in these matters.”
Veri said VOICe will reapply for the grant it was recently denied, but in the meantime, the bar association money will keep it solvent for the next two fiscal years.
The Butler Rotary Club PM plans to host a live music fundraiser for VOICe at the Penn Theater in Butler in September.
Summit Academy, a private residential school for at-risk male adolescents in Herman, received $2,000 from the bar association. Beyond academic difficulties, students face major hurdles such as substance abuse, trauma and mental health needs.
Dick Roberts, a spokesman for the academy, said, “We plan to use the funding toward Summit’s soon-to-be music recording studio.”
Summit Academy plans to begin building the studio in-house later this year through a collaboration between its trades program staff and students, its maintenance department and its IT department.
Roberts said once the studio is built students will be able to learn about music technology and sing, rap and create music as a pro-social activity as well as a therapeutic outlet for students working through their clinical programming.
It’s planned for musical sessions to be 45 minutes long and contain five students per group.
“We anticipate having five groups, so at least 25 students per week will utilize the studio with an annual benefit to at least 50 to 75 students,” Roberts said.
In addition, the academy is hoping to partner with a national nonprofit group, Notes for Notes, if the school secures enough grant funding to support the partnership. Notes for Notes is an organization that builds and runs music recording studios across the country at Boys & Girls Clubs, schools and other nonprofits.
“If we have the funding, we’d sign (a memorandum of understanding) with them to help design and run the programming at the school,” Roberts said.
The Children’s Advocacy Center’s $5,000 award will be used to heighten awareness of human trafficking in Butler County and provide support, resources and education on the subject, said Danielle Schmidt, the center’s executive director.
“Human trafficking is a big problem in Butler County. There are more and more victims we can identify,” Schmidt said.
Human trafficking can include the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
“We work with children and adult victims of human trafficking. For victims of human trafficking, they see the trafficker as someone who has a relationship with them a lot of times,” Schmidt said. “A lot of the cases we see are grooming cases under the umbrella of human trafficking.”
The center is part of a human trafficking task force in Butler County that includes law enforcement, the court administration, the district attorney, the county drug and alcohol program, the probation/parole department, Children and Youth Services, the Center for Community Resources and VOICe.
The Children’s Advocacy Center will use the award to create educational materials and training to heighten awareness of the problem, as well as distribute ChapStick containers with the phone number of a human trafficking hotline people can call for help.
“We’re extremely grateful for everything they’ve done for us for sure,” Schmidt said of the bar association foundation.
The BC3 Education Foundation will use the $3,000 it received to fund holiday meal boxes to be provided free to patrons of the college’s Pioneer Pantry.
The money will be used to buy food for 65 holiday meal boxes at Thanksgiving, 65 before the community college’s winter break and another 50 at Easter, according to Mikayla Moretti, interim director of fundraising and external relations with BC3’s foundation.
The pantry on BC3’s main campus in Butler Township started in 2019-20 and served 341 people. It assisted 910 people in 2023-24 and is expected to help nearly 1,000 people in 2024-25, Moretti said.
The bar association awarded $5,000 to the Alexandra’s Light of Hope Foundation set up by Kevin and Cathy Slane following the overdose death of their daughter.
Kevin Slane, foundation president, said his organization fights addiction in any of its forms, primarily drug and alcohol addictions.
“We found that people in recovery, working their way back to a better spot in their lives, they’ve often burned bridges,” Slane said. They have little in the way of fiscal resources or support systems.
“They need a little springboard to get on their feet again,” he said. “They need help financially to continue their recovery.”
For instance, he mentioned one woman whose addiction cost her everything, including her children, and she was incarcerated. Since then, according to Slane, she’s worked hard and gone back to school and is line for a terrific employment opportunity.
But credit problems mean she has pay an extra security deposit as well as first month’s rent in advance to get an apartment for herself and her five children. Slane said the foundation will help with that as well as collecting kitchenware, furnishings, food and clothing to get her started.
Alexandra’s Light of Hope has been in existence for three years and actively helping people for two.
“We’re a 100% volunteer organization,” Slane said.
He and his wife started the organization after their daughter, Alexandra, died from a fentanyl overdose in October 2016.
“She was a beautiful person. We’re doing the work in her memory. She would have done the same thing,” said Slane.
He estimated Alexandra’s Light of Hope has aided 50 people and eight to 10 organizations in Allegheny, Butler and Washington counties.
“We want to expand. Our long-term goal is to set up a three-quarters house,” Slane said. Slane described it as the next step in recovery from a halfway house. In a three-quarters house, inhabitants are expected to be sober and committed to their recovery.
On the fundraising front, Slane said the foundation is planning a grand dinner and wine-tasting event in October. It will also hold its annual cornhole tournament in February.
In addition to money, he said the foundation is also looking for new volunteers. We have lots of volunteers. They’re tremendous, wonderful,” Slane said, but it’s unfair to keep relying on the same volunteers all the time.
“Our goals mean we depend on reaching new people all the time,” he said.
Butler Eagle intern Vayda Pascarella contributed to this report.
