Written transcript below:
Kris Salyards, Executive Director of the Harbour: Tonight we celebrate. We are honoring Andy Kogin, principal architect for OKW. Andy is a Park Ridge resident, philanthropist, volunteer, and a staunch advocate for the Harbour’s Mission. I was introduced to Andy in 2013 at a Harbour golf outing. At the time our shelter was in dire need of improvements to meet fire code. One of those improvements was to rebuild the stairwell from the 2nd-floor fire escape. Andy designed the stairwell for us pro bono in record time. Because of those plans were able to have the entire build completed in an afternoon by Rebuilding Together with donated materials and skilled labor.
The fire marshall came back to us within a year and said that while the stairs were perfect, the house was not to be a long-term solution for our programming. We have a timeline to build this house or lose our flagship program. Andy was confident that we could get this designed, customized to the Harbour’s need, and built with philanthropic-minded people. When the Board selected OKW as the architect, OKW assigned Anders Rustin and Andy donated his time as principal.
Andy knows how important this house is to our future and had been looking for ways to make this little dream of ours a reality. To some, the house is just a place for programs, but for the Harbour, this house will hold secrets that will never be told, dried tears that will never be shown, and it will be a place where a young person can develop her future because a caring staff held her heart in their hands.
Thank you Andy, for helping bring this critical project into focus in both planning and in your advocacy. We are proud to honor you with The Harbour’s 2020 Champion for Youth Award.
Andy Koglin, President of OKW: Thank you so much Kris and the Harbour. I really appreciate this and I’m humbled by receiving this award tonight. For background, I was invited to the Harbour Golf Outing about seven years ago. During and after that event, I had a chance to talk to Kris the executive director. I appreciated her amazing energy and enthusiastic vision for the organization, and was really touched by the stories of hope and resilience from the women who spoke at the event. Sometime later I met with Kris and volunteered to help with some minor issues at the Harbour house. I had the chance to see some of the challenges of their existing home and accommodating their programs and having enough room for the women.
As I’ve said to many friends, the Habour punches above their weight class in so many ways. They make incredibly effective use of their resources. Each of their programs works in a tight relationship with one another to meet the mission of the organization. In addition, they leverage relationships with other organizations that complement the Harbour’s programs and make them that much more effective in serving the young women. They’ve built a network of contacts who direct young women to them.
Simply put, the impact in our communities is bigger than they are. None of this is possible without a truly remarkable, highly trained, and committed staff, who are passionate to advance the Harbour’s mission to help homeless young women.
I think the Harbour is important for many reasons. First, these young women are often invisible to us, and yet they’re all around us. We live in lovely suburban communities, think that everything is generally good, families are mostly a lot like ours. And while we know in the abstract that bad stuff happens, if it’s not directly in front of us, it makes it really easy to ignore.
The lives of the young women touched by the programs at the Harbour restore hope, create opportunity and self-sufficiency, and stop the cycles of poverty, abuse, and undereducation that plague so many of these young women most often through no fault of their own. In addition, the COVID pandemic has accelerated the issues, systems, families, and relationships already under stress, while government programs have been cut due to pressures from state budgets.
Most importantly, the Harbour matters because these young women matter. They all have enormous potential. There are many worthy causes and other wonderful social service organizations out there. But the Harbour is making a meaningful difference in and around our immediate community and has the potential to make an even wider impact. Jackie and I always share our time with our church and a number of other organizations but we decided some years ago to look for a local organization where we could really focus our support.
We’re proud to be involved with Kris and her amazing team in truly changing lives in Chicagoland. Thank you again.