{"id":118932,"date":"2014-07-22T18:33:18","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T00:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/award-honors-12-hours-of-mesa-verde\/"},"modified":"2014-07-22T18:33:18","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T00:33:18","slug":"award-honors-12-hours-of-mesa-verde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/award-honors-12-hours-of-mesa-verde\/","title":{"rendered":"Award honors 12 Hours of Mesa Verde"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Dani
Dani Gregory, race director of 12 Hours of Mesa Verde, presents Rose Jergens, executive director of the Four Corners Children Advocacy Center, with $18,000. Jergens' organization honored 12 Hours of Mesa Verde as the Champion for Children this year.<\/span>Mary Shinn\/The Cortez Journal<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The annual 12 Hours of Mesa Verde bike race was honored with the 2014 Champion for Children award Friday evening at Let It Grow.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to thank them so much for what they do for kids. They touch a lot of kids ,\u201d said Rose Jergens, the executive director of the Four Corners Child Advocacy Center. This is the fifth year that her organization has awarded the honor and the 12th year of the fundraiser.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all starting as the idea: \u201cHow can we raise a little bit of extra money for the kids in our community?\u201d said Race Director Dani Gregory.<\/p>\n

This year, the bike race raised $50,000 for local children and took the opportunity to award the grants to local organizations on Friday.<\/p>\n

Pi\u00f1on Project and the Child Advocacy Center received $18,000 this year. The School Community Youth Collaboration received $4,000, Southwest Open School received $8,500, and the organization gave away a few smaller awards as well.<\/p>\n

Jergens said the additional funding from 12 Hours of Mesa Verde last year allowed the center to provide therapy to 89 children from September through June.<\/p>\n

Before receiving support, the center was piece-mealing the money together.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really hard for us to get mental-health money,\u201d Jergens said. Most of the money goes to Cortez Integrated Healthcare. But it is important to have alternatives for children who are victims and their families so they don\u2019t have to worry about running into former abusers at the clinic, she said.<\/p>\n

Pi\u00f1on said the funding they received last year helped to increase funding for one-on-one mentoring and group mentoring during summer school at Kemper Elementary, said representatives from the Pi\u00f1on Project.<\/p>\n

Gregory attributed much of the events success to members of the community being willing to volunteer and the generosity of the riders. The event attracted 857 racers and raised $6,500 more than it did last year.<\/p>\n

Gregory, who has been with the race since the beginning 12 years ago, will be leaving the board this year to spend time with her new baby.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be back, I\u2019m sure,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

mshinn@cortezjournal.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

raised $50,000 for local kids<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":118933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6370],"tags":[640,13,714,610,2682],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-118932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mt-sports","tag-award-and-prize","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-human-interest","tag-social-issues","tag-social-services"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118932"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=118932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}