Winners of annual Frontiersman Good Neighbor Awards honored

Living in a place like the Valley, it’s not easy to single out just a handful of people to recognize as good neighbors.

But the Frontiersman staff grit its collective teeth and made tough decisions this year, selecting two people and two organizations to receive this year’s installment of the Good Neighbor Awards.

Each was present at a ceremony in our press facility Friday featuring both a performance from the Colony High School marching band and a cameo from the much-beloved Radio Flyer wagon car.

So, here are the winners we picked:

Adult Good Neighbor: Marilyn Redd

Perhaps it’s a measure of Redd’s dedication to her yearly clothing giveaway that, upon hearing she’d been singled out for praise by a newspaper, she quickly realized it would be a good way to get the word out and maybe get some new recruits. She’d like to expand the giveaway this year to two locations.

“I’m looking for volunteers that could do the Palmer one so I could do the Wasilla one,” she said.

And if clothing giveaway doesn’t sound like a big deal, you’ve clearly not been to Redd’s giveaway. The event draws in what she describes as a “mountain of clothes” so large that it’s all her crew can do to get them sorted by sex and general age group, nevermind size.

“There’s such a need,” Redd said, recalling the time she tried to quit before realizing she couldn’t. “These people need this and you need to do it.”

She said the giveaway comes in August, just in time for the start of school. Many people who come say that’s the perfect time. It’s an expensive month, and some folks can’t afford both school supplies and school clothes.

She said the program is about as no-strings-attached as it can get. Nobody is turned away. They can take as much as they want. Yes, she tells people, they can shop for multiple kids. No, they don’t need to leave with a Bible or listen to a sermon. Yes, they can shop for their neighbors who couldn’t come.

“There’s a couple of people that are shopping for their garage sale so they can support their habit,” she said, adding that, “you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

She said it takes months to collect it all and then, when it’s over, the remainder is spread back out to the community. Some go to a woman in Big Lake who does the same sort of thing on a smaller scale and more continuously. Some go to Mother Lawrence in Anchorage, the woman made famous there for her charity work. Some go to rescue shelters.

“I used to take the summer clothes to Guatemala,” she said.

Where does it come from? All over: churches, school lost-and-found bins, thrift stores, consignment shops.

“It’s exhausting but boy is it fun,” Redd said.

Youth Good Neighbor: Gabrielle Zaleski

Zaleski showed up to the ceremony dressed in both her Colony High School cheerleader’s uniform and in tiara and sash that proclaimed her “Miss AK Senior Sweetheart.”

Those latter two items, of course, are a dead giveaway that she does beauty pageants. The organization that proclaimed her Alaska’s sweetheart is the America’s National Teenage Scholarship Organization.

But aside from competing, she’s also an organizer. This year she put together the Miss Snowflake Pageant that drew 30 contestants ages 7 to 18, all of them special needs girls and all of them princesses.

“I actually know a girl with special needs,” Zaleski said of how she came up with the idea. She said she figured, “I am able to do pageants, so why not have a pageant they can do?”

In a Frontiersman article from April discussing the pageant, Zaleski said Miss Snowflake wasn’t like Miss America or the popular reality show about competitive youth pageants, “Toddlers in Tiaras.”

“I organized Miss Snowflake as a place where (special needs) girls could showcase their talents,” she said.

In addition to crowning seven Snowflake Pageant winners — seven girls who, like Zaleski does in her pageants, got to feel like princesses — the pageant raised $1,400 for the Mat-Su Region of Home Community Resources. Her goal had only been $250.

Zaleski’s already scheduled the 2014 pageant.

And though her senior year in high school has just begun, she also knows where she’s headed. Along with her ANTSO tiara she got a year’s worth of college tuition, which she intends to apply to her freshman year at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She plans to be pre-med.

“I want to be a pediatrician,” Zaleski said.

Nonprofit Organization Good Neighbor: Alaska Job Corps

For 20 years, the center has been a part of the Palmer community, tucked away on a well-groomed campus near the city’s airport.

In that time, the center has trained Alaskans from around the state in skills as diverse as heavy equipment operating, dental assisting and the culinary arts. But along with employment skills, Job Corps keeps an eye on its goal of also instilling in its students a sense of volunteerism.

“It’s ingrained in the program. It’s part of the role of Job Corps in the community,” said the Palmer center’s director, Malyn Smith.

She said that students would soon be working on a rehabilitation project for the Alaska WildBird Rehabilitation Center. They’ve fixed driveways for the recycling center and plan to bring cupcakes to an upcoming Santa Cops and Heroes event.

She said Job Corps focuses on nonprofits for a reason. If they helped out for-profit ventures, the center wouldn’t be a good neighbor to the contractors that would otherwise bid on that work.

“We don’t want to take business away from the community,” she said.

But it’s not like the students don’t get anything out of it. Those cupcakes were prepared by the culinary program, the driveway straightened by the heavy equipment class. It’s real-world experience, and that it’s unpaid is really so much the better.

“We are inculcating a sense of volunteerism,” Smith said.

Business Good Neighbor: Larson Chiropractic

The doctors at Larson Chiropractic know, as their representative at Friday’s ceremony said in accepting the award, that, “it takes a community.”

None of the doctors could attend because Friday was a big sports night in the Valley and they were all out at games making sure the competitors stayed safe.

It’s a role the business has played for years, starting with the sports career of Dr. Dan Larson’s own nine children. He said after that, he stayed on because he just loved it so much.

Larson said in a 2009 Frontiersman interview that he was at the sports events anyway, so he figured he’d volunteer. Soon he’d taken on football, basketball and wrestling, and even earned more certifications to learn to treat sports injuries. And he’s kept going long after his own kids graduated.

“I just can’t quit. It’s all about the kids. I get so much of a thrill out of seeing them successful, and I feel like when I’m there I can contribute something no one else can,” Larson said.

Since then, the business has donated thousands of hours and bought and donated tape to bind young ankles by the pallet.

The health care professionals at Larson Chiropractic clearly love the work, but it’s also not easy, especially when they watche a player go down knowing they’re hurt.

“It’s always difficult, but my role is I immediately switch to a different mode. My heart’s sick, but I call it being in my clinical mode,” Larson told the Frontiersman. “You have to get your emotions out of the way and you have to stay focused.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.