GRANITE CITY — A free veterinary clinic Wednesday morning was a perfect example of how three organizations can come together to help people in the community.
Partners for Pets and Metro East Aid Mutual Aid (MEMA) co-hosted the clinic to provide pet owners with free vaccinations and microchips for their four-legged friends. The event took place at the Twigs Community Center, 2101 Cleveland Blvd. in Granite City, where MEMA holds its monthly meetings and stocks items for a variety of projects in the community.
“Every time you shop at a Petco store, you are donating to Petco Love, which is their foundation that supports local animal welfare organizations,” said Erika Pratte, executive director of Partners for Pets. “We receive some vaccines free of charge that we can administer throughout the community and we were looking to expand our community vaccination clinics.
“We have been holding clinics at the Main Street Community Center in Edwardsville for two years and wanted to expand. We decided to start with MEMA because (part-time Partner for Pets employee) Sharon Autenrieth is involved with them, and their organization does great work in the community.
Spread the word
Pratte noted that Wednesday’s clinic offered people the opportunity to get free care for their pets as well as advice from a licensed veterinarian.
“Everything we are offering today is completely free with two of the vaccines given through Petco Love, while the remaining services are given through Partners for Pets,” Pratte said. “Today, we provide free vaccinations, microchipping and a brief physical exam for animals, in hopes that we can help pet owners in the community care for their beloved pets.
“We also talk to them about food resources and things they can work on within the community to help them keep their pets at home.” »
Autenrieth, meanwhile, is a founding member of MEMA and co-pastor of Rooted Community Church in Granite City with Twigs founder Lisa Guilliams.
Autenrieth also works part-time at Partners for Pets in Troy as a kennel technician at the cat shelter. For her, the clinic offered an opportunity to help pets and their owners while raising awareness of MEMA and its work in the community.
“MEMA aims to meet the need in any way possible, and I know how expensive pet food can be,” Autenrieth said. “Many of the people we work with through MEMA are on low incomes and this is a great partnership between three organizations. »
MEMA formed in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a united support system in which community members commit to caring for each other.
Combine efforts
Earlier this year, MEMA officially connected with The Family Treehouse, a Granite City-based nonprofit that runs the Twigs (fighting child hunger) program.
MEMA got all of its funding through small donations, with the exception of a $1,000 donation from Shipley Chiropractic in Granite City. It serves all of Madison and St. Clair counties and has already compiled an impressive list of community service projects.
“I’m sometimes a little overwhelmed by what we’ve been able to do,” Autenrieth said. “Since the beginning of September, we have received requests from 107 different families for supplies from our baby supply room.
“Over the past month we have been doing some yard work for a family who was having trouble keeping up with things in their home. We are currently helping an unhoused young woman move furniture and we are buying another woman a new bike after her bike was stolen here in Granite City.
“We helped connect some people who needed school supplies with Twigs, which offers school supplies before the school year starts.”
Volunteers are the lifeblood of MEMA, which has 545 followers on its Facebook page and about 160 followers on its private Facebook group.
“The pool of people who show up and do things is about 25 people, but you can accomplish a lot with 25 good people,” Autenrieth said. “Today we have two new volunteers helping us in the baby supply room. »
Autenrieth added that the partnership with Twigs is beneficial for both organizations because they have many common goals.
“Twigs’ core mission is children’s food security, and they fight childhood hunger,” Autenrieth said. “The community center is a former church and is a venue for things like NA (Narcotics Anonymous) and AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings, as well as a dance studio, Head Start programs, MEMA and our church (RootedCommunity).
“All these different community groups have a place to go. We also have a community garden and a pavilion available to people. Lisa has a vision for the entire community and that goes way beyond just food security.
Feed the children
Launched in 2011, Twigs is a summer meal program and school year bagging program in several communities in Illinois and Missouri.
“It started at the church I served, and the founding partner was Trinity United Methodist Church,” Guilliams said. “They bought a 700 square foot house on East 25th Street and there was a series of stories over a period of months where we started to realize there was a need.
“I had attended a seminar and discovered the small community of Sandoval, Illinois, which had a summer lunch program. Shortly after, I contacted him. He said Sandoval was a town of 1,000 people and he wasn’t sure how the program would work in a town of 29,000 like Granite City.
“For the first two or three years, he checked every summer and couldn’t believe it worked.”
The twigs continued to grow each year. After providing 2,500 free lunches to children the first summer, the organization provided nearly 101,000 lunches this summer.
“We are in 31 communities with a varied start and finish depending on when the school year starts and ends in each community,” Guilliams said. “The children receive five lunches each week. »
During the school year, Twigs offers its pack-a-sack program, also known as the backpack program.
“We are in 10 school districts and we prepare 1,300 to 1,500 bags of food every week, with four and a half meals in each bag,” Guilliams said. “That’s 25,000 to 30,000 meals and it’s as big, if not bigger, than the summer program.”
Donated building
Twigs is 100% volunteer and receives no federal or state money. All of its funds come from grants or donations.
“Typically 80 to 82 percent of that goes to food and we always try to keep it above 80 percent,” Guilliams said. “The rest goes to insurance and other things we can’t escape.”
The building that is now the Twigs Community Center was once the home of St. Peter’s United Church of Christ.
“In the summer of 2019, they called me out of the blue and said, ‘Lisa, would Twigs like to have a building?’ They were very forward-thinking because most old church buildings don’t sell very well and just fall apart, so they just offered it to us for $1,” Guilliams said. “St. Peter’s only dream was that life would return to this place and that it would become a busy building.”
“It has become a true community complex and everything in it has adopted a wellness theme, from NA and AA meetings, MEMA, The Rooted Community to Head Start. Michael, owner of Effervescent Studios, is in recovery and has been sober for over two years. Its motto is “Dance… a new step in life”. »
Upcoming expansion
Across the street from the Twigs building is a community garden, storage shed and pavilion with four picnic tables, where the veterinary clinic was held Wednesday.
“We bought this land from the city for a very low price and it’s a community garden in the summer where people can come and pick whatever they want,” Guilliams said. “The Niederringhaus United Methodist Church closed its doors and there was a big bus with a flag on top. By then the city had taken over the property and I asked them if we could have the clubhouse.
“The guy who did the work for us cut four feet off each of the posts to bring them down because they were too high. He painted it, put a new roof on it and a gentleman here in town donated the cost of the roof and concrete. The hangar was an Eagle Scout project – the Scout needed a project and we definitely needed a hangar.
Construction is well underway on a new facility for Twigs at 21st and Cleveland which will be used for food storage and distribution. Guilliams hopes to have it ready by mid-October.
“It’s just going to be shelves and refrigerators and pallets of food for the summer program and the school year program,” Guilliams said. “For seven years we had been leasing a building from the Granite City School District, but last October they let us know that we had to vacate the building because they were going to turn it into a technology center.”
Guilliams and other Twigs members looked at existing buildings around town, but they all needed a major renovation or had too many steps.
“We needed a single-story building to be able to roll pallets and the building we were given here is beautiful, but it has a lot of steps,” Guilliams said. “The new building measures 30 x 85 and is 2,550 square feet.
“Additionally, we will have two large Polar King coolers in front of the building that are designed to go outside. They are currently in the old building, but the school district has given us permission to keep them there until We are ready to move them.”
For more information about Twigs, visit https://www.twigsforkids.com/go to Twigs on Facebook or by email twigsforkids@gmail.com.
For more information about Partners for Pets, visit www.partnersforpetsil.org or go to Partners 4 Pets on Facebook.
For more information about Metro East Mutual Aid, or to donate or join the group, visit Metro East Mutual Aid on Facebook or by email. metroeastmutualaid@gmail.com.