Val Wilcox: Building a better community

For every incredible community project, and every big, beautiful fundraising dinner, there are people behind the scenes working feverishly to pull it all together.

Val Wilcox is one of those people.

A self-described “idea person,” Wilcox sits on the boards of two local nonprofits that benefit children. She also supports area businesses by volunteering with the Post Falls Chamber of Commerce.

She recently helped the Jacklin arts and Cultural Center in Post Falls with its Pan Asian Experience fundraiser, and she helped organize last night’s Wine, Stein and Dine fundraiser to fund the Post Falls Education Association’s classroom grants for teachers. Wilcox has also played an integral role in the development of the Boys and Girls Club of Kootenai County.

“I have to say that I am totally in awe of all the people who are so passionate about the nonprofits that are here, and the business people that come to the aid of all these causes,” Wilcox said.

An organized organizer, Wilcox acknowledges she is just one of many who help make great things happen in Kootenai County.

“I was a member of the Kootenai Alliance for Children and Families for a number of years, which was a wonderful spot to learn of all the wonderful nonprofits in the community who are doing great things, but you don’t always see them,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox sat down with The Press last week and talked about her many activities in the community.

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Which community groups or activities are you involved in these days?

I’m on the board of directors for the Boys and Girls Club, and I’m on the board of the Post Falls Education Foundation, and I’m a Post Falls Chamber of Commerce volunteer and chairman of the Ambassodors Committee. I also do the publicity and advertising for our church, Community United Methodist Church in Coeur d’Alene.

What prompted you to get involved with the Post Falls Education Foundation’s annual Wine, Stein and Dine fundraiser?

It started over 20 years ago. Before I came on the scene, some moms were selling T-shirts and having bake sales to earn money for things for the school district that they couldn’t afford. That fizzled out after few years, and then the school district couldn’t pass a levy for anything, because it was kind of a retirement community, and they just weren’t engaged in voting for these levies. Then new housing started growing, and we were looking at double-shifting again. My husband and I worked on every levy, and we were so disappointed that they didn’t pass and that people didn’t support the schools. What happened was, the local building contractors got together and they decided, on their own, with the school district’s approval, to do some projects that needed to be done. They helped pave the parking lot, they painted a building, they put in drinking fountains. They did a lot of things. With doing that, they wanted to reinstate the nonprofit education foundation that had kind of gone by the wayside. So they got that reinstated as a 501(c)(3), and that’s how the new board got started. And along came the idea of Wine, Stein and Dine. My husband was on that committee, and he said to me, ‘Now it’s your turn, and they’re going to do this event that you need to find out about.”

How long ago was that?

That was 20 years ago. They had done this in Boise, and since that wasn’t close to us, we thought we could borrow that idea. We had about 200 the first year, and we bought auction items at the outlet mall, just to have something on the tables. Now it’s our 20th anniversary, and we’ve raised over $500,000 for creative and innovative classroom teacher grants that supplement the basic curriculum. We usually have about 100 grant requests each year, and we have to decide which ones we like the best. It’s hard, but the ones we like rise to the top, and others, we look to see if maybe we can find another way for them to get the funding for them.

How many people usually attend the event?

Roughly 500 each year. We’ve had as many as 600.

Let’s talk a little about the Boys and Girls Club.

I’d been on the Post Falls Education Foundation for 10 years, and I went to a meeting I saw in The Press. It was this gal trying to start this concept of a Boys and Girls Club. I thought, we really need something here. My kids never had something like that. I knew what a Boys and Girls Club was. We had one where I grew up, but it was a Boys Club. The girls snuck in (laughs), to watch the boys play basketball. I just followed her path for a while. She had a really good meeting with some people from Lewiston. That’s an awesome club in Lewiston, and where we gained a lot of knowledge and as we went along, they were really instrumental in getting us established. We got money for a demographic study donated, and that showed a club should be built in Post Falls because of the demographics of the families and the neighborhood location we had selected if we were to build a club. The clubs are always usually based in neighborhoods where they’ll have the best access from the schools.

We began doing a little bit of fund-raising, but the bigger thing we had to do was friend-raising. There were too many people who didn’t know what a Boys and Girls Club was, what it could do or what it had to offer. So we did a lot of friend-raising events. It was just information. We never asked for money. It was just to let people know what it really was. Then they hired Ryan Davis, the executive director, who has been phenomenal, and we have two sites, a new building under construction in Coeur d’Alene, and a wonderful, very capable staff that adores the kids. They are wonderful mentors to all these kids who are there every day after school and all summer.

How do you think you came to be so community-service inclined?

It started back in junior high. We didn’t have sports. We had the Girls Club, and the Boys Club. They were pretty much event planning and small community projects, and that was over in Everett. I have to say my high school counselor was one that helped us with these events and always gave me confidence that these were going to happen. I was the first sophomore they ever picked to be on this special events committee.

My parents owned a retail shoe store in Everett, That was before the malls came along. I was involved in the Downtown Everett Association, just like we have the Coeur d’Alene Downtown Association. I was involved with that, probably when I was 19 or 20, and we did downtown events, just like Coeur d’Alene does. I was asked to be the chairman of that one year, and I was like, ‘Really?’ But I did it. You know, you just put your mind to it and get something done, and I was always able to do that. So I’ve always kept my finger on the pulse of the business community and the nonprofit community. I just enjoy that.

I went to work for D.A. Davison and Company, where I was a marketing assistant. My husband and I both worked there, and together we were able to garner a lot of support from the company for various projects and nonprofits and chamber of commerce activities and things like that.

Before you were at D.A. Davison, you worked at Ponderosa Elementary. What did you do there?

I was a volunteer for years, until my kids were older. I was PTA president and fundraising chairman at the school. Eventually I was hired by the school, and I worked alongside the librarian in the library and in the classrooms. My time as an aide was very rewarding because I worked with students who needed a lot of extra help, as well as those who excelled. I always felt that I was helping to keep those kids from falling through the cracks of the mainstream curriculum. It’s great to see those students today, who were at both ends of the learning spectrum, as successful adults.