A Courtroom, a Route, a Trivia Table

Picture the last night of a class here in Batavia. No test. No grade. Each person stands up, alone, and talks for three minutes about what their life is supposed to be for. Some of them are high school athletes, saying it out loud in front of their own teammates. The man who teaches that class works upstairs on Wilson Street. I found him under a pop-up tent at the farmers market.

Welcome to Batavia This Week, the community helper edition. A courtroom that needs a steady voice, a meal route that needs hands, a mile that needs your feet, and a trivia night that needs your useless facts.

I'm Gary Ricke, and together with several students at Batavia High School, we're building bataviail.co. Here's why. Batavia has around twenty-two hundred businesses, and there's no one place to find them all. So we go find them. We stop at the tents, we walk into the shops, we ask the people behind the counter what they're up to. Then we come back and tell you.

Fourteen East Wilson Street. Right next to the Comedy Vault, up a flight of stairs, there are forty-five hundred square feet that most of us have walked right past. That's Eighteen Thirty-Three Leadership. And the man who runs it, Jeremiah Chaney, is about as Batavia as it gets.

When I stopped at his tent, it took about a minute to figure out I already knew his son. J P made the video tribute to Coach Dennis Piron. And Jeremiah? He played for Piron. In the nineties. Back when the coach was just getting started.

So when Jeremiah talks about what one adult can do for a kid, he isn't guessing. He was the kid.

What he teaches is servant leadership. The goal, in his words, is moving relationships from transactional to transformational. Less, what can you do for me. More, who are we becoming.

Here's how it works. A coach or a business sends a group, twelve, fifteen, twenty people, and they go through a ten-week class together. One week to get started. A week on each of the core virtues. And then that last night. Every person stands up and gives a three-minute speech about what the impact of their life is supposed to be. Think about being sixteen and saying that out loud, in front of your whole team.

This past year that was Batavia basketball, Batavia football and Geneva football. Wrestling joins this fall. A coach in Greensboro, North Carolina is running the curriculum with his team, there's another coach up in Michigan, and they've even done training in Ethiopia, where his daughter teaches fourth grade. Three years in, it's still a grassroots nonprofit. As he put it, they're just trying to get their feet on the ground.

Now, the catch. You can't just sign up for the class. Not yet. It runs on trust and a little vulnerability, so groups usually come in through a coach or a leader who already knows the people. But I asked him if he'd ever open it up, and here's what he said. If he's got fifteen kids who want to show up, let's do it. Let's try it.

So here's your door in. Start with a workshop. Life Mapping You is seventy-five dollars. You look back at the moments in your life that actually meant something, and you find the handful of things that give it meaning, no matter what your job title says. The Personal Impact Statement workshop is fifty. And Thursday mornings, six thirty to seven thirty, there's Men's Fellowship, which Jeremiah describes as just dudes coming together, trying to figure out how to be better husbands and fathers.

Go to eighteen thirty-three leadership dot org, fill out the contact form, and tell them what you're curious about. And if you know fifteen kids who'd show up? Tell him that too. He meant it.

Picture a courtroom where a kid's whole future gets decided by adults who met that kid this morning. Now picture one person in that room who actually knows the child. That's a CASA volunteer. CASA Kane County trains ordinary neighbors to speak up in juvenile and probate court for kids who've been through abuse or neglect, and the training keeps going after you start. This week alone there are sessions on finding substance use help for teens, on understanding I E Ps, and on safe sleep for babies, all at one hundred South Third Street in Geneva. You don't need a law degree. You need to be steady. If you've been circling this one for a while, call CASA Kane County and ask how volunteers get started.

A hot meal. A knock. A few words with whoever opens the door. For some of the people on that route, that knock might be the only conversation they have all day. Batavia Rotary runs Meals on Wheels out of the United Methodist Church, and Friday's run needs hands. It's free to help, nobody needs experience to carry a meal up a front walk, and it's real service, the kind you can feel. The start time isn't posted, so reach out to the Batavia Rotary Club and ask where to be. Then go knock.

One mile. At a ballpark. That's the whole ask. Saturday morning, the Northwestern Medicine Living Well Cancer Resource Center holds Steps for Survivorship at Northwestern Medicine Field in Geneva, home of the Kane County Cougars. Registration opens at eight, the survivor celebration is at eight forty-five, and the walk steps off at nine, with a family festival after. The money goes back into the center's programs, the free counseling, the nutrition classes, the support groups that families around here lean on when the news is hard. Walk it for somebody. Walk it with somebody. Saturday morning, Geneva.

Somewhere in your life there's a person who knows every state capital and has never once been rewarded for it. Saturday night, that changes. Batavia Rotary is throwing Trivia to End Polio Now at Enticing Cuisine, out on Route 59. It's a trivia night for a cause, and the cause is right there in the name. These are the same Rotarians who deliver the meals, hand out the grants and tend the pollinator gardens around town, so the next table over is full of people who quietly keep this place running. Saturday, six in the evening. The price isn't listed, so call ahead. Build your team now. Draft the capitals person first.

That's Batavia This Week. There's a whole lot more we couldn't fit, and it's waiting for you at bataviail.co. Here's my ask. Pick one thing you heard today and actually go. And when you get there, tell them you heard about it here. I'm Gary. See you down in town.