Her idea: Birthday parties for homeless kids
Back in the spring of 2011, Megan Yunn was helping a 10-year-old homeless girl with her reading homework, when the girl stumbled over a word she didn’t know: “accustomed.”
“I told her how it was used in a sentence, as in ‘at birthday parties, people are accustomed to eating birthday cake,’ ” said Ms. Yunn. The little girl, who was named Beverly, looked confused — and then she told Ms. Yunn she’d never had a birthday party. Or birthday cake either, for that matter.
“It was one of those moments in life, when she shared that with me, it kind of took my breath away,” said Ms. Yunn of Irwin, who was then director of volunteer programs at Washington & Jefferson College. She regularly worked at a local shelter’s afterschool program for at-risk children.
“I thought right then and there that I needed to do something about this.”
She did. Beverly’s Birthdays was founded in early 2012, with Ms. Yunn quitting her job at the college so she could focus on building the nonprofit. So far, so good: in 2014, with the help of private donations and a grant from the Grable Foundation, she hosted 64 birthday parties for more than 150
children with more than 1,000 guests.
Ms. Yunn is one of seven finalists for Most Outstanding Volunteer of the Year in the local Jefferson Award for Public Service program for 2014, which is administered by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with sponsorship by BNYMellon and Highmark. All 48 Jefferson Award winners will be honored at a May 4 ceremony at Heinz Field, where the Most Outstanding Volunteer will be announced. The winner will represent Western Pennsylvania at the national Jefferson Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., this summer.
As part of the program, WOMEN of Southwestern PA will donate $1,000 to Beverly’s Birthdays on Ms. Yunn’s behalf.
Ms. Yunn was nominated for the award by Katelynn Livingston, who, after working with her at Washington & Jefferson College considers Ms. Yunn a friend, mentor and inspiration.
“Her dedication to service runs through every strain of her life,” said Ms. Livingston, a 25-year-old Greensburg native who now works in Washington, D.C. She attended the first birthday party for a homeless child that Ms. Yunn hosted. “I remember getting in my car afterward and crying. If you go to one of these parties it stays with you forever.”
Ms. Yunn, now 30 and a mother of two young children, said that after her encounter with Beverly, she entered the BE BIG in Your Community Contest sponsored by Scholastic Books, and won a $2,500 award in August 2011 to help her start the program providing birthdays for homeless children. A 2002 graduate of Bethel Park High School, Ms. Yunn graduated from Marietta College in Ohio and earned an MBA at Point Park University. Before heading up the volunteer program at Washington & Jefferson, she worked as an AmeriCorps service member with urban youth who’d had brushes with the law.
“There are such negative stereotypes about these kids, but when you sit down one-onone, you get to walk in their shoes, and they walk in yours. I just loved that. They don’t want to be labeled bad kids. They want to make a positive difference in their lives.”
Beverly’s Birthdays partners with 33 agencies across a six-county region and is just now beginning to make money, which has allowed her to pay two employees, who help her organize between six to eight parties a month at homeless shelters and residential treatment centers. You can read more about the charity at www.beverlysbirthdays.org.
“With every party I walk away changed,” she says. “I am inspired by the resiliency of these children and their families, who have gone through terrible circumstances. The gift we get to give them is the experience to be able to say, ‘I’m part of a normal family,’ and forget about the stress of their lives, if only for a little while.”