{"id":1448,"date":"2022-11-22T16:05:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T16:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2025-01-16T16:08:06","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T16:08:06","slug":"living-thanksgiving-tallahassee-nonprofit-supports-pace-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/living-thanksgiving-tallahassee-nonprofit-supports-pace-girls","title":{"rendered":"Living Thanksgiving: Tallahassee Nonprofit Supports Pace Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It started with $350 and the Dollar General.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warren Cave’s friend had four kids who were going to have no presents for Christmas in 2009. He couldn’t afford to buy gifts that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cave “adopted” the family, acquiring a modest trove of toys from the discount store with his own money. It was the children’s favorite Christmas, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a decade later, Cave’s nonprofit, the Clean Start Initiative, fed Thanksgiving dinner to hundreds of children from low-income families and at-risk communities across North Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clean Start helps incarcerated individuals transition back into communities and supports their families, according to its website. The nonprofit also supports families facing hard times and at-risk children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His Thanksgiving food recipients include girls and families at the Pace Center for Girls<\/a>‘s Thanksgiving event, Pacegiving; children in Gadsden County and the Live Oak and Madison area; Big Brothers Big Sisters and a drive-by meal event for Capital City Youth Services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has already bought 150 Christmas gifts for local kids. He has 14 families, amounting to more than 30 kids, on his list to be “adopted” for the holidays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kristel Avilus, program director for Pace, has been friends with Cave for nearly 20 years. She said the school’s annual Pacegiving couldn’t have happened without Cave’s donations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He is such a giving soul,” Avilus said. “Anything we need for the girls, he gives. He gives more than he receives.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pace eighth-grader Asia Cuyler, 15, attended the center’s Pacegiving. She said she was grateful for Cave’s support. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I think it’s special,” Cuyler said. “I like how he’s doing it for the girls and for people because you never know what people are going through.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cave also provided catered barbecue dinners to individuals at the Kearney Center, a homeless shelter in Tallahassee where he teaches a weekly class on self improvement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Cave opened his Thanksgiving class on Tuesday, Nov. 15, he told his students it was a special lesson. It was his anniversary: 25 years since he last checked into a homeless shelter himself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He always teaches about building a better future, said Theresa Roberts, who has lived at the Kearney Center on-and-off for about six years and is a regular in Cave’s class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He gives us integrity, helps our inner person develop,” she said. “A lot of people need to hear that.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts said the number of people attending his class has tripled in the month she has attended. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It lifts the people here up,” she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
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The Clean Start Initiative, fed Thanksgiving dinner to hundreds of children from low-income families and at-risk communities across North Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"post_tag":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1453,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions\/1453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pacecenter.org\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_tag?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}