Downtown Sterling celebrates Family Resource Center's 20th anniversary

Downtown Sterling filled with vendors, bouncy houses, live music and nonprofit booths as residents gathered around the Family Resource Center’s 20th anniversary and the America 250 Colorado 150 commemoration. The Main Street celebration also featured a free community meal at noon through The Longest Table, turning 120 Main St. into a public showcase for one of Logan County’s most visible family-service nonprofits.

The event put the Family Resource Center’s role in everyday county life at the center of the afternoon. The organization says it began as a grassroots effort in 2006, started by a child welfare caseworker to meet the need for a community-based, professionally supervised parent-child visitation center. Parenting classes began in 2007 and have continued since then, giving the center a longer track record than the anniversary number alone suggests.

Today, the Family Resource Center says its mission is to encourage healthy children and strong family units through support systems, education and referral services in rural northeastern Colorado. Its programs include parenting classes, youth programs, family support, supervised visitation and safe exchanges, Colorado Community Response, free childcare while families are at the Justice Center and resource and referral services. That mix of services helps explain why the organization’s anniversary was not treated as a private milestone, but as a downtown event meant to pull in families, neighbors and partner agencies.

The center’s location at 120 Main Street in Sterling ties that mission directly to the heart of the city. Its team page lists Executive Director Yvonne Draxler, along with Shantilly Mason, Ryan Avila, Kay Wernsman, Nikole Canas and Lauri LaBadie, putting familiar names behind the services many Logan County families use when they need help, supervision or a connection to other resources.

The Chamber’s listing framed the celebration as part of Hometown Market Place Celebration 2026, linking the anniversary to a broader pattern of civic activity in Downtown Sterling. That mattered on a day meant to connect local history to Colorado’s 150th anniversary and the nation’s approaching 250th, while also giving residents a reminder that family support services in a rural county often depend on steady partnerships as much as they do on funding.

The Family Resource Center’s anniversary also fits a broader support network. A 2021 Sterling Journal-Advocate report noted support from El Pomar Foundation, underscoring that the center has long drawn attention beyond its own walls. After 20 years, the celebration showed an organization that has grown from a grassroots idea into part of Sterling’s civic infrastructure, still meeting needs that stretch from supervised visitation to parenting support and referrals for families across northeast Colorado.