County Commisioner Mary Stern practices cartwheels with guidance from Kung Fu instructor Joseph Bronson. Stern promised to do a cartwheel to celebrate raising $1 million for YCAP’s new building campaign.
Marcus Larson
News-Register

Mary Stern flipped Wednesday.

As promised, the Yamhill County commissioner performed the first cartwheel of her life. She did it to celebrate reaching the $1 million mark in the Yamhill Community Action Partnership capital campaign she’s leading.

While $1 million represents a major milestone, it’s only about a third of the $2.96 million YCAP needs to complete a new complex, featuring a larger food bank and warehouse, on five acres of industrial property on McMinnville’s Riverside Drive.

The next major milestone will be the $2 million mark. And Stern is promising a back flip to commemorate that one.
Stern promised in October that she’d celebrate the benchmark with a cartwheel.

She never learned to cartwheel as a child, she said. Because YCAP’s work with struggling families hearkens back to her childhood years, she said, learning this small feat of gymnastics seemed like an apt way to celebrate.

Early in Stern’s childhood, her father suffered a retinal hemorrhage that left him blind. His condition forced him to quit his job running a printing plant.

While he trained to become a court reporter, which depended on hearing rather than vision, Stern’s mother took care of the family’s seven children, who ranged in age from 2 to 12.

But she didn’t do it alone. She received help from the Massachusetts counterparts of McMinnville’s YCAP.

Stern said the family got canned pork, powdered milk, creamed corn, peanut butter and chunks of cheese. “Without this assistance, I don’t know that my family could have survived,” she said in an account published in YCAP’s October newsletter.
In gratitude for the assistance her family received in its time of need, Stern has made YCAP a priority of hers. She spent four years on the YCAP board, two of them as chair.

Fellow County Commissioner Kathy George is now handling the YCAP assignment, but Stern is leading the agency’s capital campaign.

The campaign officially got under way in 2007. However, YCAP leaders wanted to flesh out details of their building plan before taking it public in a major way, and it has only reached that stage in recent months.

YCAP is currently getting by with just 1,800 square feet. That doesn’t provide adequate storage for food or afford clients enough privacy, Stern said.

In addition to a new food bank facility, YCAP is proposing to move its administrative office and bus system operations to the new site.

Community fundraising officially started in April. The News-Register and the Willamette Valley Wineries Association are among entities that have led fund drives on YCAP’s behalf over the intervening months.

The fundraising proved so successful that Stern found herself at the Mountain Warrior Kung Fu Academy in McMinnville earlier this week. There, she underwent some rudimentary cartwheel training under the tutelage of owner Joseph Bronson, a YCAP board member.

As she practiced fledgling flips on the soft blue mat, trying to remember to kick her legs high enough and line her hands and feet up along an imaginary beam, she couldn’t stop talking about raising that first million.

She was soon giving her inner child full sway. “I’ll do a back flip at $2 million,” she promised, clearly caught up in the moment.

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HOW TO HELP
To donate to YCAP’s To donate to YCAP’s capital campaign, and elevate County Commissioner Mary Stern’s pledge from cartwheeling to backflipping, contact her at 503-434-7501 or sternm@co.yamhill.or.us. Or contact YCAP Director Lee Means at 503-472-0457 or leem@yamhillcap.org. Stern is leading the campaign, Means the agency.