PHOTO BY TIMOTHY KAYS, STAFF
By: Timothy Kays
Mark Pitman, the Executive Director of the Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC), came off the 5K color run course with a smile on the sunny morning of September 21. He and others were taking part in the 33rd annual CPC Steps for Life Walkathon event being held at the MacDonald-Ruff Ice Arena in Bryan.
The annual event is a fundraiser for the CPC, but it provided something for every age. From the 5K for adults and seasoned runners, right on down to rock painting for the kids, activities “We are a medical clinic,” Pitman explained in describing the mission of the CPC, “…helping men and women with unplanned pregnancies, or even a pregnancy that they’ve planned, but they’re just trying to figure out how they can navigate through what may be difficult waters financially.”
“They can’t afford some things. Parenting…they’re maybe not as equipped as they could be to parent well, and so we want to help them. We want to help a woman who is pregnant, or maybe just found out that she’s pregnant to assess that medical question, am I pregnant? Is it a viable pregnancy? And then, to the degree that they’re choosing life, we want to help them parent well so we provide free parenting classes. In exchange for the parenting classes, we give them cribs and mattresses, and car seats, diapers and formula and all sorts of things that they’re going to need for their little one.”
“We’re a social service agency,” Pitman continued, “…but we’re focused from a Christian perspective. We want to help people, not only with a physical need that they have and answering some medical questions, but we want them to think about some spiritual things and maybe some bigger questions in life, using some circumstances in their lives to maybe open the door to have some of those conversations. And then lastly, we also do an educational thing to seven different counties in northwestern Ohio.”
“We’re reaching over 6,000 students. We’re in more than 50 schools, and we’re talking about healthy relationships, boundaries in relationships, safe dating. We’re talking about STIs. We’re talking about pregnancies; we’re just talking about decisions that they can make today, wisely, so that they’re not dealing with the consequences later on, whether it’s a pregnancy or an STI or other sort of undesirables. So that’s really what we’re doing. This is a fundraising event to help us to provide the resources that we need financially in order to do that.”
Pitman added, “Everything that we provide to clients, whether they’re coming into the clinic, or whether we’re going into the classroom, is free of charge. There’s no charge for that, but the cost of doing that is then picked up by generous donors and people who believe in our cause, whether it be individuals, churches, corporations. We want to provide the resources to be able to reach these people and reach them well. This event is an awareness. It’s letting people in the community know what it is we’re doing, as well as raising sufficient funds to help us to continue to operate.”
Timothy can be reached at tim@thevillagereporter.com