Eggs

FLORENCE (AP) — They may not know it, but Bill Armstrong’s eight hens are helping survivors of domestic violence get their lives back on track.

“The girls,” as Armstrong calls them, produce about six eggs a day. Every Monday at noon, he brings a half-dozen of the fresh eggs to the Greater Shoals- Sheffield Rotary Club’s regular meeting to be raffled off.

Beloved by the Rotarians and their families, those eggs have raised about $900 in the past year to help cover the cost of new furniture for Safeplace’s Lauderdale County shelter, which serves people fleeing domestic abuse.

“Some days — the ‘Safeplace Nest Egg’ is what we call it — can get anywhere between $30 and $40 for a half-dozen eggs,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong has been a CASA in-service volunteer for about seven years. He became familiar with Safeplace through that work. It also led him to join the Greater Shoals-Sheffield Rotary Club, of which he served as president.

He noticed then that Safeplace didn’t have anyone helping them transition people from the shelter into residential housing.

“I was pretty sure I could find a team of people that would be willing to, on an on-call basis, help them move furniture or whatever they needed,” he recalled. “We’ve been doing that for more than a year.”

Armstrong also learned Safeplace was looking to replace all of its shelter furniture from the mid-’90s. They figured the cost to be about $9,000, so the club got to work with fundraising efforts.

It was around this time Armstrong inherited his hens from his home’s previous owner.

When Safeplace Executive Director Rachel Hackworth started at the nonprofit 13 years ago, she said they helped 10 to 12 people with transitional housing, which involves paying rent, assisting with utilities and providing additional support. This past fiscal year, that number reached about 187.

She said a large part of that involves helping meet clients’ basic needs so they can see a brighter future ahead.

“It’s tremendous how much the services have grown,” she said. “Now, we have clients who can see that their life is going to be better. We have so many people who are coming to Safeplace who don’t feel like they have to go back to those abusive relationships.”

Hackworth said she loves the eggs — and the chickens — but she also loves the partnership with Rotary.

“Every time you have a small group of people come together, sit around and talk about how they’re going to make our community better, they make it better,” she said. “It comes in very little ways. It comes from Bill being present — being at a CASA in-service — and hearing a need, and going, ‘Oh, I’m a part of this other group. I think we could meet this need. What can we do?’

“It sounds so small, but there are plenty of people that don’t step up, that don’t stand up, that don’t speak up. There are also even more, especially in our community, that do, which is part of what makes our partnership with Sheffield Rotary Club so amazing, because that started a whole avalanche.”

While the chickens’ contribution to Safeplace is a novelty, Rotarian Mitch Hamm said the eggs were, more importantly, a catalyst for further support from the club, bringing about more than $6,000 in additional funding.

“It was kind of the impetus for getting this thing rolling,” he explained. “It’s not the eggs that produced it, but it was an important part. If it hadn’t been for them, probably none of the rest of this stuff would’ve happened.”

Since the egg raffles began, the club has adopted Safeplace as a major focus of its community service.

Armstrong said members have contributed about $2,500 in donations. The club also secured a grant of about $3,900 to help cover the cost of new furniture.

“We belong to a Rotary district that runs from Tuscaloosa up through Huntsville and northern Alabama,” Armstrong explained. “It’s a big district, and our district has funds that we can write a grant for. . . . We’re pretty close to what they wanted. . . . I believe they’re going to be able to replace all the furniture.”

Though the hens’ contribution may be small, Hackworth said the money raised from their eggs — directly and indirectly — have helped take some of the financial burden off Safeplace as it prepares to open a new shelter in Marion County.

“A lot of our financial resources have been going toward getting that shelter up and running, so it’s been extremely helpful to us to have the support from Sheffield Rotary to help us meet some of the needs in the Lauderdale shelter,” she said. “I just love that some of what may seem like the simplest ideas — or things that may not take a whole lot of effort — can make such a tremendous difference.”