It takes a village, so it’s been said, to help a community succeed, and Bernice Gordon-Young is literally using that philosophy to help meet her city’s needs.

Gordon-Young started It Takes a Village of Peoria, Inc. six years ago and the charitable organization now has three shops at Manual High School, Knoxville Center for Student Success and her office at OSF Healthcare Behavioral and Mental Health.

“We offer food, supplies, clothes and conversation,” said Gordon-Young’s mother, Gloria Wilson, who mans the shop at Manual on Friday afternoons.

Everything is free from ITAV. The shelves at Manual are stocked with clothes and shoes for all ages, household cleaning supplies, toilet paper, tissue, paper towels, baby supplies, toiletries, canned goods and boxes and boxes of food.

And plenty of conversation, which plays into Gordon-Young’s professional occupation as a psychotherapist. “This is based on want, not need,” the organization’s president said as she stocked the supply locker at the Center for Student Success shop. “We don’t ask ‘What to you need?’ We ask, ‘What do you want?’ ”

Wilson, “Mama G” as she is affectionately called by those who know her well, held court with Roberta Gordon and Ella Ashby at Manual recently. “Usually we get here by (1 p.m.),” said Wilson. “If we get a good conversation, we’ll be here until four.”

That communal approach was on full display March 19 at ITAV’s fourth “FREE Prom Dress Giveaway” at Studio C at Kellar Station. There were 500 dresses — most brand new with tags — hundreds of shoes, makeup, and jewelry on display and up for grabs. All for free.

“Awesome, awesome day,” said ITAV villager Sharon Hardin-Hines, who greeted the girls at the door at Studio C. “A lot of parents are relieved they don’t have to go shopping.”

The spirit of giving has always been in season for Gordon-Young. Growing up on the South Side of Peoria, she took after generations of strong women who did the little things to help their community — having neighbor kids over for supper, offering up a bed or a couch for a couple nights, giving rides, lending a hand, etc.

Being a single mother at Southern Illinois University, she also got to feel the benefits of a village’s help. But, true to form, the young Bernice Gordon found time — inspired by her sisters in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and her sweetheart status with the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity — to volunteer talking to children and visiting nursing homes to help take care of her elders.

“Working at OSF, I talked to a child who had no socks on, but it was snowing outside,” Gordon-Young recalled. “Her mom thought she was depressed because she was losing weight. But she said she wasn’t depressed. She was giving her lunch to her little brother so he wouldn’t go hungry.

“That’s where it all started. What can I do for him?” she thought. “You can make them feel good for 45 minutes, but then they leave. How can we help them after they go home?”

Gordon-Young went home and actually Googled “helping the community.” She found out the Manual volleyball team needed equipment. That’s all the former Rams netter needed to know. So she started working the phone and got what her alma mater needed and then some. “The response blew my mind,” she remembers.

ITAV works on donations — goods, services and, of course, money — to stock the nonprofit organization’s shelves, and is at the ready to meet a community need (read: want). “It has a way of working out,” Gordon-Young said. “We make it work.”

There was a homeless woman who kept stopping at a friend’s barbershop. ITAV brought a bunch of stuff over to give to her.

ITAV goes to prayer vigils and community cleanups. It will help put on local events (the first was one, believe it or not, was a Willie Nelson show at Three Sisters Park) and give out food baskets and care packages. ITAV supplies mini refrigerators to college kids, and once worked with the Food Bank to set up a grocery store at the county jail during a labor dispute.

“Sometimes people come to us with someone in need,” Gordon-Young explained. “Sometimes we go out looking for them. We are really big on collaborations. Whatever we do, we come in and try to help.”

Her warm and welcoming personality is infectious. People naturally want to help her cause. Four young men snapped to it and helped Gordon-Young carry clothes and boxes of supplies into the Center for Student Success.

Once Mama G and her daughter bought 100 cheeseburgers from McDonald’s and handed them out around town.

“People give us all kinds of furniture,” Wilson said. “We post it. We also deliver. We have two U-Haul storage units full of stuff. If someone calls or we hear of someone in need, we go out and look to see what we got.”

Mother and daughter — and Gordon-Young’s daughter, Dominique Wash, sister Beverly Thomas-Bradley, husband, Trent Young, and a handful of others — have got quite an operation going.

“We have such a phenomenal team,” Gordon-Young gushes.

Teachers and staff at Manual and the Center for Student Success help the cause by observing students to see what might help them — and their household — along. Then they bring them by the shops.

ITAV buys in bulk — Gordon-Young just cleaned out a local discount store of all its flip-flops (a couple hundred) since spring is here. And students who stop by her shops are encouraged to think of not just themselves, but their whole family. “The students know what they need at home,” Wilson said at Manual. “So, in a manner of speaking, they are taking care of the house.”

Just what the community needs, er, wants. Especially these days, what with the pandemic and gas prices and inflation and …

“Since things are the way they are now,” offered Mama G, “we are going to need a lot more products than we do now.”

Leave that to her daughter Bernice Gordon-Young, who noticed ITAV needed more school supplies at the Center for Student Success as she restocked and reorganized the room there.

Then she loaded up her big, white Ford F-150 truck with the leftover stuff, and it was off to her office at OSF Behavioral and Mental Health to counsel another client. More events will come, like the Juneteenth celebration and the annual Lupus walk/run, according to Gordon-Young, who, on top of all this, is working on a Ph.D. from Walden University:

“We are going to be that table that is giving out stuff for free.”

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