Bill Legere has helped disabled, victimized children and sex workers in India. He’s helped street kids in Ecuador who risk being abducted for their organs.
And he’s formulating plans now for helping abused children in Maine.
Legere, 41, from Auburn, has worked quietly through the nonprofit Foundation for Hope and Grace, inspired by his late 9-year-old daughter.
Regular trips overseas are done without much fanfare. He and board members pay their own way. Money for them to make donations has come in mostly by word of mouth.
After five years, Legere is only now considering the foundation’s first fundraising campaign.
He didn’t want to ask for money until the foundation had proven itself. It would be too easy to say he planned to do good.
He wanted to show it first.
The foundation started after Bill and his wife, Teresa, lost their daughter Grace in a horse-cart accident on June 2, 2008. Part of Legeres’ “Founder’s Letter” on the foundation’s website reads that it began on “the hope that we will be defined not by our tragedy but by our response.”
“My colleagues at work made this generous donation (after Grace’s death),” Legere said. “I didn’t feel like I could accept it.” The money was formally set aside, and once “it was sitting there, we wanted to make good use of it.”
Initial plans were to help families with funds for adoptions. It helped with eight, Legere said, before the mission broadened to reaching out to both orphans and vulnerable children.
Hope and Grace works closely with local people and gives to projects that will become self-sustaining. The foundation aims for a five-year involvement and makes that clear from the start.
“We invest heavily in relationships,” he said. “We don’t go looking for projects; they come to us.”
Some of its projects so far:
* Helping an after-school program in Ecuador that created an outlet for street kids who were getting involved in petty crimes, being used by gangs to beg, sexually abused or worse.
“There was an underground market for organs,” Legere said. “They were a prime target for getting their organs stolen. I felt like we did what we needed to do, and they’re still doing really well.”
* Helping disabled children in India with therapy and respite care and helping female trafficking victims and their children. The women are often lured from farms to the big cities, then trapped in the sex trade where they live in 4- by 8-foot brothel stalls.
“Underneath is where they store their belongings, and the children would sleep underneath while the mothers worked,” Legere said. “There’s some effort to do brothel day care for the kids to give them a chance. That’s sad; it broke my heart.”
The foundation has received and given out between $20,000 and $25,000 each year, Legere said.
He and board members are exploring now the creation of a child advocacy center in Lewiston-Auburn, a place for children to turn when there has been a threat or report of abuse, tell their story once and get help. It would offer forensic interviewing, medical and mental health care, law enforcement and prosecutors all under one roof. New Hampshire has 11 child advocacy centers, Legere said.
There are no accredited comprehensive centers like that in Maine.
In addition to being board president, Legere works in the emergency room at Central Maine Medical Center as a nurse practitioner. He and Teresa have five girls at home, ages 3 to 13, adopted from Romania, Uganda and Latvia.
“They’re amazing kids,” Legere said.
He’s learned a lot in his travels, some that can be brought back home to help people here.
“I feel like I’m that person that can take a little bit of a risk,” Legere said. “You can argue that a 9-year-old didn’t do that much to impact the world. (Grace) was just a really good (kid).
“She had this special demeanor,” he said. “She had the lens of seeing the world through the eyes of an underdog. I want to let people know kids can make a difference in the world.”
Editor’s note: Maine has two child advocacy centers, although neither are yet accredited. For information, go to: www.silentnomore.org
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