Founder of YARN dedicated to kids
Founder of YARN dedicated to kids
Berthenia Gill has inspirational messages displayed everywhere, from a painted sign in her yard about God’s grace to quotes taped above the doorway of the living room in her Mayflower home.
But it’s the message she has given young people since 1985, when she founded the Youth Advocate Resource Network Inc., that means the most to her. “That’s been my baby,” she said. Gill said she wants young people, especially those who have limited opportunities, to know that they can be successful. They can go to college or start a business, and succeed in life.
At 79, she’s still leading the group, taking members on one major trip a year — a Travel-N-Learn Education Tour — and planning an annual educational workshop.
She has scrapbooks and boxes of photographs from the trips. Some of the information about the group was lost when the YARN center was destroyed in the 2014 tornado that tore through Mayflower.
The first trip of any significance, she said, was in 1994 to the White House. She had
I’ll never forget the eyes of the children.”
Berthenia Gill
FOUNDER OF THE YOUTH ADVOCATE RESOURCE NETWORK
made reservations for about 70 students, and they were given a tour “bottom to the top, all the way to the president’s suite,” she said. “I tried to do it this year; but they wouldn’t allow us in,” she said.
They saw other historic sites while they were in Washington, D.C. Students have been to several Martin Luther King Jr. museums, including ones in Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama. Another trip that is among her favorites was to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Orlando, Florida, she said.
The trips she’s gone on with young people include colleges and universities, such as Spelman College and Morehouse College, both in Atlanta.
“We get them off the bus, put them on the campus and say, “Would you like to come here? Here’s how you do this.’”
Gill said she’s proud that not once on an overnight trip has she had trouble from a student, nor has she had to send one home — although she’s made it clear to the students that’s an option if they misbehave.
“I’ve been known to sleep in the hallway,” she said.
The YARN organization started in 1985, but Gill had for years had a special place in her heart for children.
“There was a void, especially in this area, with children that limited them in exposure. They knew nothing or very little about choosing careers,” Gill said.
She’d had a few careers by that time.
On the third Sunday in March 1985, she invited 65 adults in professional careers, from police officers and firefighters to corporate executives, to talk about their jobs.
“It was across cultures — it was black, white, you name it,” she said. The adults were asked to wear their official uniforms. “I’ll never forget the eyes of the children.”
The event was held at Palarm Chapel Baptist Church in Mayflower, where she is a member, and youth were invited.
“It was a church full,” she said.
“That was intended to be one shot only. Parents said, ‘Will you please do it again?’ That’s what started that snowball rolling,” she said.
Gill and her husband, the Rev. Alvin Gill, married in 1982.
“He’s been a good supporter. He’s been there every step of the way,” she said.
She said support has come from others in the community, including the Rev. Cornell Maltbia, pastor of the True Holiness Saints Center in Conway.
Maltbia said Gill “has been a tremendous inspiration and mentor over the years; in fact, when I was a teenager, she took me on a youth trip or two I’ll never forget.”
He said that when they traveled to Atlanta, it was the first time he’d ridden a chartered bus.
“She has a wealth of wisdom,” he said.
Gill came to Arkansas when she was 7. She lived with her mother in Detroit, and she came to Mayflower to live with her grandmother, Lillie Ella Collins.
“That was my soul sister; we were tight,” Gill said.
Gill left Pine Street High School in Conway early — she took College Level Examination Program tests.
Married the first time at 18, Gill went to school in Dallas, where she was on track to become a registered nurse.
“The morgue was something I couldn’t take,” she said. She graduated as a licensed technical nurse instead. She worked as a surgical nurse for four years at “the old Baptist Hospital” on Bishop Street in Little Rock. “That just wasn’t me,” she said.
After that, she “bounced all across the country.” She was divorced with two children.
She moved to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri in 1969, when she married a military man. She was a base advocate for families and started doing social work for Central Missouri State College in Warrensburg, now the University of Central Missouri.
She also worked for the Appleton City Community Action Agency in Missouri as a trainer in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, covering three counties. She trained and introduced children to the workforce, she said.
“I found my real niche,” which was working with children, she said.
However, Gill moved to Conway in 1972 while her home was being built in Mayflower. She was hired as the first black teller at First National Bank in Conway, she said.
She liked her job, but she still wanted her “real degree,” as she put it. After four years at the bank, she went to Shorter College in North Little Rock and Philander Smith College in Little Rock and earned a degree in psychology with a minor in secondary education.
Gill taught gifted and talented children at Southside Junior High School in Jacksonville for a few years, she said.
“It put me in a limited environment,” she said. What she “longed for,” she said, was to work with children who really needed her.
Gill left teaching and went to work at Central Arkansas Legal Services in Little Rock.
“That’s where I got my foot in the poor people’s door,” she said. Gill said she means “poor in spirit.”
The experience piqued her interest in law, and she thought she might want to be an attorney. Gill said she passed the law-school-admittance exam, but decided she didn’t want to become a lawyer.
“I knew that I could not stand before a judge and defend somebody I knew or possibly knew was guilty,” she said.
Always ready for a new challenge, she took a job at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, where she managed and trained small minority businesses.
She stayed there 12 years, but Gill said she looked across the street at the state Department of Education and wondered what it would be like to have a job there. She told her boss, then Executive Director David Harrington, that she might want to work at the Department of Education someday, and she said he recommended her when a job came open.
“I tell kids, ‘You must plan, or do something you can transfer across cultures, across boundaries,” she said. “You’ve got to be able to move.”
Gill got a job at the Department of Education and presented workshops at school districts throughout the state to inform administrators of the department’s regulations.
“I absolutely enjoyed that,” she said. “It was an endearment to me to be able to visit schools across this state.
“If I walk down the street in Little Rock today, there will always be someone whom I met
or worked with.”
Gill retired from the position in April 2011.
In June, she started having headaches, and her vision was affected; she is blind in one eye.
“They still today don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “I am blessed to be alive today, and I know that. I know I have kind of surprised the medical people that I have come so far.”
However, her health problems have not slowed down her work with YARN. Last year, she took the group to The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida.
This year, she is considering a Building Young Entrepreneurs camp in Atlanta, which is designed to teach young people how to be business owners, she said. No more than 12 students will be chosen, and they need to have at least “a thought” that they want to run a business, she said.
Also, YARN will sponsor the a cappella choir of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, for a 6 p.m. performance Feb. 20 at Palarm Chapel Baptist Church. It is the second time YARN has sponsored the choir, she said.
Gill said her goal is to help students not fall through the
cracks and to make sure the Travel-N-Learn Tours stay in place when she is no longer part of YARN.
“I made a pledge when I started that I will not let it fail,” she said.
Post it on the wall; put it on a sign — she means it.