CHAMPAIGN — The Crisis Nursery in Urbana is hosting its annual Holiday Shop this weekend at The Orpheum in Champaign. While the non-profit primarily focuses on helping children in crisis ranging from infants to six-year-olds, the Holiday Shop is open to all children who want to find gifts for family, friends, and loved ones.
IPM Morning Edition Host Kimberly Schofield spoke with Crisis Nursery’s Assistant Director of Development & Marketing, Russell Zillman, about the organization and the seasonal event.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
RUSSELL ZILLMAN: We’re a nonprofit. We call ourselves an island of safety. So we care for families and children in the community that maybe just need a little extra help, you know. So we’re talking families that are dealing with housing instability, perhaps job loss or medical emergencies. And we’re a place where you can take your kids, 24/7. It’s entirely a free facility, and we can care for your children. We feed them, we give them a warm place to sleep, and it’s a place where we like to say they can just be kids and not have to worry about all those difficult things that parents sometimes have to deal with.
KIMBERLY SCHOFIELD: The people who are involved with Crisis Nursery … do they do community outreach? Is it just a place where people can go if they know about it? How do people know that this place exists?
ZILLMAN: So, word of mouth is kind of our best friend, but … we do have two different teams there. We have our safe children team. They’re the people that work with the children on the child floor. They do the intakes when parents drop off their kids. Then we also have our strong families team. These are home visitors that can work with families to maybe make it so they don’t need to use our services in the future. They can work closely with them, talk about advice and strategies to be a strong family. So they do a lot of outreach, specifically that team. They go to a lot of events here in town. Whenever there’s a nonprofit fair, or a couple weeks ago, we were at the Day of the Dead fair at the Marten Center.
Word of mouth is definitely our best friend. We’ve been here for 40 years, so a lot of people have heard of us, but don’t necessarily know what we do. Sometimes people might think it’s kind of a daycare. We aren’t that. We’re for those crisis situations more specifically, but we are willing to just take a kid when the parent might need a break.
SCHOFIELD: Yeah, and it sounds like help find resources. Were there any unexpected challenges or shifts that you all noticed with the organization during the recent government shutdown?
ZILLMAN: No, not for our facility … it’s an interesting dichotomy in nonprofits because when the government shuts down, or, you know, during COVID, that’s when the community bands the most together to support. For instance, our friends over at the Eastern Illinois Food Bank, they got so much love and support when the SNAP benefits stopped, and that’s because we live in such a great community that does band together, and we always feel that strength too. When we feel like our cupboards might be a little empty, we’ll share a picture on Facebook and we’ll have, you know, 15 Amazon packages the end of the week, you know, just to fill our cupboards up. So the community always supports, especially in those times of strife.
SCHOFIELD: When the holiday seasons come around — so about now — is there anything specific that the Crisis Nursery does for the community or any unique events?
ZILLMAN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we have one of our favorite events we get to put on every year. It’s called our Children’s Holiday Shop. That’s been around for about 30 years. Instead of parents buying gifts for children, we reverse it — so children get to buy gifts for their parents and their family and their brothers and sisters and all their loved ones. It’s going to be at The Orpheum in downtown Champaign this year on December 4th through the 6th. The 4th and 5th will be from 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. and then the 6th will be from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. So, we’re decking out. We’re decorating The Orpheum in all types of beautiful holiday decor.
It’s a very volunteer driven event. We have volunteers take the kids through the shopping area. It’s very affordable. All gifts are between, you know, $2 and $10ish. So parents set their kids up with a list of maybe the max amount of money they can spend, and their volunteer follows that, leads the kids through the shopping area, and then they wrap it while the parents wait in a lounge by themselves and maybe buy some raffle tickets or something like that.
SCHOFIELD: That’s really sweet. Is it open to all kids in the community?
ZILLMAN: Yeah, it’s totally open. Anyone can come by. It’s really a fun event.
SCHOFIELD: Is there anything that you’re looking forward to specifically with this upcoming event and the end of the year and the holiday season?
ZILLMAN: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the first events I got to do was the Touch a Truck event. We do that in August over there at Carle at the Fields and that was the first really children’s-centric event I’d gotten to do. We had done our gala, we had done our wine tasting, but nothing where you got to see a bunch of kids all together. And that event was just so much fun … seeing the kids play on the big rigs and the tractors and everything. It was just so cool. So that made me really excited for the Holiday Shop. It’s going to be great to see all the children so excited in the holiday spirit.
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