PORT ANGELES — Johnny Whatton was a woman who didn’t want anybody missing out on inexpensive adventures.
So when her son, Doug Whatton, heard about plans for a new First Step Family Support Center building in Port Angeles, he seized the opportunity to honor Johnny and her passion.
He arranged to have a room — one without a door, signifying its ongoing openness — named the Johnny Whatton Family Literacy and Reading Resource Center.
The room is to be filled with books and children because “my mother felt that reading should not be an elitist pastime,” Doug Whatton said, adding that before Johnny’s death in 1993, she was active with the Friends of the Sequim Library, an organization that helps provide books for all.
The room is part of the under-construction First Step Family Support Center house being built next door to First Step’s older building at 325 E. Sixth St.
This new, two-story house is a kind of community quilt, with Whatton and others adding squares.
The $815,000 project, begun last spring, is an expansion of First Step’s services for young children and their parents, families who can use a hand as they lift themselves out of poverty.
In addition to its counseling rooms, child care center and a conference room that will be available for rent to other community groups, the house has a playground to be named after a woman who devoted more than 15 years to teaching at First Step — and who watched other women grow new wings.
She’s Rosemary Gala Moorhead, and she’s thinking of dubbing the playground the Gala Place, though the final list of sponsored spaces and names at First Step won’t be revealed for a few more weeks yet.
“I wanted to step up to the plate,” Moorhead said, and help fund a place where children frolic outside, perhaps while their parents are in a counseling session or class.
A health education teacher who retired in 1997, Moorhead taught her First Step clients things like cooking nutritious dishes with inexpensive ingredients and took moms and their kids on field trips to places like Dungeness Spit, to give them a sweet taste of the outdoors.
Today, First Step continues to offer an array of programs: from smoking cessation to maternity support to parenting courses to support groups such as “Choosing Healthy Relationships,” to vocational counseling and job training.
“The purpose of the agency is to provide innovative and family-centered programs,” noted Cherie Reeves Sperr, First Step’s development manager, adding that in 2008 the center’s 21-member staff served 4,478 primarily low-income adults and children.
“I still walk around this community and see women” from her years at First Step, Moorhead said.
“They have employment; they’re making a contribution to the community. The real important issue for them,” when low-income women seek help at First Step, “is to parent well.”
That’s a source of self-respect, as is the college education some of the young moms later completed.
Moorhead took her clients to the Peninsula College campus, listened to them say, “I don’t feel like I belong here,” and then urged them to enroll. Many finished vocational training programs, she said.
The 4,174-square-foot house will be finished later this month, and a “grand ribbon cutting” will come early in the new year, Sperr said.
The naming rights for a room cost a $10,000 donation, Sperr said.
Another sponsor is still striving toward that goal, a cup at a time.
Renaissance, a massage, tea and coffee bar at 401 E. Front St., plans to name First Step’s new conference and training room not after itself but after Cafe Femenino, a woman-owned coffee cooperative in Peru.
Renaissance is setting aside for the First Step fund $3 from every 1-pound bag of Cafe Femenino coffee beans and $2 from every 12-ounce bag sold at the cafe. Lynn Keenan, Renaissance’s owner, said the Peruvian coffee grower urges its retailers to get involved in such community projects as First Step.
Nita Quan, First Step’s longtime director, said licensed child care will become a part of First Step’s offerings once the new house is finished, and Moorhead’s playground will of course be a component.
First Step always has been a place where people learn about new possibilities for their lives, said Moorhead. And now, as fundraising continues for the expansion, Sperr and Quan want it to be possible for just about anyone to be a sponsor.
The new house itself will be named in honor of a community member thanks to a major donor, Sperr said, though the name won’t be announced until the opening in early 2010.
First Step receives funding from the United Way as a partner agency and won a $19,000 grant for the building from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural development program.
But donors of varying means have a role in this project, Speer emphasized. First Step is collaborating with Aglazing Art, Port Angeles’ paint-your-own pottery studio at 207 W. First St., to provide tiles to surround the center.
“We’ve already got a bunch done by little kids,” said Sperr.
Four-inch square tiles cost $10 while 6-inchers are $25.
Whether your donation is $10,000 or $10, Sperr emphasized, “you can help build this building.”
To contact First Step, phone 360-457-8355.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
