May 8, 2017

Meet Phyllis Avrit of Fayette Pregnancy Resource Center in Fayetteville

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Phyllis Avrit.

Phyllis, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My husband, Carl, and I were both involved in a Christian pro-life pregnancy center in California before moving here in 1990. He was on the steering committee to start it and I became a volunteer counselor shortly after they opened. It was there that I found my heart’s passion to serve God, help women and save babies, all in the same place. We offered help to pregnant women and encouraged them to choose life for their babies.

When we arrived in Atlanta, the first thing I did when we moved in was to look through the phone book and see if there was a pregnancy center to volunteer at. There wasn’t one near us. We then recalled friends suggesting that perhaps we would be used to begin another pregnancy center. That idea stubbornly wouldn’t go away. Two years later, we began with a steering committee to survey the community and see if both the support and the need was there. In April of 1994, we first opened our doors in a small rented office complex in downtown Fayetteville. With just one counseling room and a tiny clothes closet (one rack) we began serving women in our community and have been growing steadily ever since. Our goal has always been to save two lives: the physical life of the baby and the spiritual life of the mother.

We have moved two more times as we continued to grow, and then in 2012 we moved into our own new 7000+ square foot building in historic downtown Fayetteville. In 2014, we became a medical pregnancy center and now offer ultrasounds to our clients.

Since 1994, thousands of women have been helped and hundreds of babies saved. Over 750 ultrasounds have been done in the past three years.

My husband and I are still actively serving. Carl is board president. I serve on the board and am a volunteer counselor. Interestingly, we still have two other members of our board who have been with us from the beginning. The same passion still exists to help men, women and their families that we had in the beginning.

On a personal note, this very ministry that we felt compelled to serve in, we have been doubly blessed by. Two of our three children were adopted through another pregnancy center and adoption agency.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nothing worthwhile is ever smooth all the time, is it? Our biggest struggle over the years has been raising support. There were some very lean years in the very beginning. When a non-profit is first starting up, a lot of potential supporters want to see your track record and know that what they’re investing in will be around tomorrow. We still have many of the same individual supporters that we had twenty-three years ago. We are grateful for the handful of churches who believed in our ministry and stood beside us from the very beginning. God has faithfully provided for us all these years. I never expected our pregnancy center to be as big a ministry as it is today. I stand amazed.

Not having an advertising budget, another struggle has been simply letting people know we’re here and can help. We still meet people that have never heard of us or know our services are available in our community. Word of mouth and the internet are where the majority of our business comes from.

Personally, my biggest struggle was when we were just beginning, and I had to decide if I wanted to be a board member or a counselor. Because counseling was where my heart was, I wanted to do that. Because I was the one with the experience and vision of what I wanted the center to be, I wanted to be a board member. At the time, I could only be one or the other. I had to go with my heart and trust God to direct the board. That was difficult letting go. I felt like Moses being told he couldn’t go into the Promised Land. Two years later, the board made an exception for me to be both a board member AND a counselor.

Fayette Pregnancy Resource Center – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We are a medical pregnancy resource center. All of our services are free. We offer pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and counseling to our clients. We provide basic necessities for babies through our Earn While You Learn program, where our clients earn Baby Bucks to purchase items in our clothes closet, which is now extensive. The center offers abortion recovery and healing for women wounded by abortion. Many fathers are part of our Earn While You Learn program, and we have a growing men’s mentorship program. While our clients are able to purchase items they need, they also learn about their pregnancy, delivery, infant and childcare, first aid and many other subjects that help enable them to feel more prepared for parenthood. For more than twenty years, we’ve had a group of quilters who have made quilts to give our clients. Every client is able to choose a colorful quilt at the completion of their ultrasound. It’s usually the first gift they have received for their unborn baby.

The people who both work and volunteer at the pregnancy center are what set us apart. Nearly all of our staff were former volunteers, which helps ensure they are fully committed to what we are doing. Volunteers are carefully screened and we have people that want to be there, that love our clients and care about what happens to them. We have over sixty volunteers who work regularly at the pregnancy center. We have been told many times how much our clients love coming to see us, and even walking in the door they sense it is a safe place to come and get help.

We have events throughout the year to help raise funds and provide more community awareness. We have an annual gala, golf tournament and this year our third 5k run/walk.

We also provide purity tea parties for churches or community groups for young teen girls. They are encouraged to see, through God’s eyes, their value and worth as a precious china cup rather than a throwaway Styrofoam cup or everyday coffee mug.

Because our Earn While You Learn program is 18 months long, many relationships are formed between us. Sometimes we get more than a client- we may get their entire family, including siblings. We’ve had clients come directly from the hospital to show us their babies, perhaps because no one else was there to be happy for them. We’ve been birth coaches to a few of our clients. We’ve been to baby showers and even weddings of some clients.

We are a Christian ministry and that encompasses everything that we do. We have seen many lives changed, including our own.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Seeing a life changed or a baby saved and knowing I had a small part in that. All the hours and long work, all of it is worth it.

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