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Up and Comers: Kimmy Yon
Taking Kate's Club to the next level
by Carol Carter
May 30, 2008
K
immy Yon, 33, is the brand new and first development director at Atlanta's Kate's Club, a
5-year-old nonprofit organization for children and teens coping with the death of a parent or
sibling.
Yon's job, says board chairman LeighAnn Costley, is to take Kate's Club to the next level.
"We've survived on
special event revenue and donations from friends and family," says Costley, CPA, Deloitte Tax LLP.
"We wanted someone who had experience with grant writing and with foundations – able not only to
research foundations in the metro Atlanta area that are a good fit for us, but also someone who had
been successful doing that.
"Kimmy was looking for a new challenge," Costley says, "and we were looking for somebody who
could really take the reins and run with it." So Kate's Club hired Yon, whose first day on the job
was Feb. 25.
Previously, Yon – an alumna of both Atlanta's Pace Academy and Hollins University in
Roanoke, Va. – had directed charitable giving for Douglasville-based Inner Harbour for Children and
Families, a residential psychiatric treatment facility for youth.
One thing that attracted her to Kate's Club, says Yon, an Atlanta native, is the energy and
the youth behind the organization. Not only does it have what Yon describes as a "fantastic
mission," but she says the people who support Kate's Club are "uniquely geared to wanting to help."
With this year's annual operating budget of $345,000, the development goal for the year is
$430,000, "the idea being," Costley says, "that we would like to raise enough to have three to four
months of operations in the bank, which is something we've never had before."
With the hiring of Yon, the fundraising focus of Kate's Club has shifted. Whereas special
events have raised nearly 75 percent of Kate's Club's past funding, now the goal is 21 percent from
foundations, 4 percent from corporations, 35 percent from individuals and only 40 percent from
special events.
One of those annual events, the Dinner of Champions, occurred shortly after Yon was hired.
The sold-out event, she says, was a little different this year in that it honored a boy who died
five years ago at age of 10. "His family took the money that they were saving for his college fund
and created a foundation where they could give back to the community in honor of their son."
One of the ways they've done that is by supporting Kate's Club. "We try to remember," Yon
says, "that even though you have had a loss, there is still a life to be celebrated – the life that
person did have. I think this event [the Dinner of Champions] really captured that."
Just a month after she was hired, Yon says she already felt that she was making progress.
"It's not always about numbers and money, in terms of reaching those goals," she says. Ultimately,
she thinks it is relationships that will sustain Kate's Club over the next five years as the
organization celebrates its 10th anniversary, then, later, its 20th anniversary. "I think we're
meeting our goal every day by being able to spread the word, being able to tell people what we're
doing and how they can be involved in helping our cause.
"I have a firm belief that people really do want to help," Yon says, "if you can just give
them the avenue to allow them to do that, be it giving through fundraising or their time through
volunteering."
Currently, Kate's Club has three full-time staffers and one part time. If Yon is successful
in bringing in more funds, the next priority, in terms of staff, will be to hire a program
director, "someone who has a licensed therapeutic background," Costley says. "We currently contract
out that role to social workers, music therapists, art therapists. We have a programs manager who
facilitates all of our programs, but she doesn't have the clinical training that we would like the
person overseeing our programs, in the long run, to have."
Among the programs Yon's fundraising will help to support are the annual Dinner of
Champions; club outings to places such as the Center for Puppetry Arts; Clubhouse Saturdays, where
members gather for activities including poetry, arts and crafts, sculpture, theater and dance;
age-specific support groups; and Camp Kate, a three-day retreat.
A special holiday program gives members extra support on and around Siblings Day, Mother's
Day and Father's Day, Thanksgiving and the December holidays.
Founded by Kate Atwood, who lost her mother to cancer when she was 12 years old, Kate's Club
guides children through their grief in a comfortable, safe and uplifting setting.
"It brings together children who have lost a parent or sibling," Yon says, "and sort of
unites them in that community where they are safe and it's OK for them to grieve, and they can
still be kids and enjoy their lives through their grief journey.
"The people who support Kate's Club, I think, really understand what we're trying to do,"
Yon says. "Many of them had losses themselves, and it's interesting to me to see people open up,
almost instantly, about something that's very personal upon knowing what we're trying to do."
After her initial meetings with some of the people involved with Kate's Club, Yon says she
got the sense that there is an enormous amount of potential. "It was really exciting to me to be a
part of an organization that is still fairly young and able to have a mission that people
understand across gender, across race, across faith. I was excited to be a part of something that I
knew was on the cusp of just getting ready to take off."
Losing a parent or sibling, says Yon – herself a mother – is truly life changing. "As a
child, you feel like you're the only one that it's ever happened to. So, to be able to come into a
place where the other children have experienced the same thing, you immediately don't feel so
alienated. That's what I think is so important about what we do – to be able to give those children
a place outside their immediate family to be able to grieve and to be able to process through their
grief as they go along in their lives."
