Daybreak’s Board President, Alisha Eilers
To kick off the celebration of our 50th birthday, we spoke with Alisha Eilers, our board president and a previous Daybreak client.
To commemorate 50 years, we’re featuring 50 voices of people Daybreak has touched since opening on January 19, 1975. We are still looking for more voices to feature, so if you or someone you know have been impacted by Daybreak, we’d love to hear from you!
Please enjoy Alisha’s story and thank you for being here with us!
Hi Alisha! It is so great to talk to you about this. I am talking to Alisha Eilers, and she is the board president for Daybreak and very accomplished person. But I want to talk about long ago, what first brought you to Daybreak? How did you end up there?
Thanks for having me. Like most of the kids that come through the path of Daybreak’s doors, I came through a cycle of runaways and a cycle of instability. The interesting piece about my tale is that my mom was a runaway before there was a place to go. So, I stayed in Daybreak, it’s been nearly 40 years ago.
It was in 1986, and they opened the doors, as you know, in 1975. It was just a one building location that had a girls’ room and a boys’ room with some bunk beds. I always joke around and say that’s back when we had to make our own food in the kitchen versus how the kids at Daybreak have it now with some of the amenities that are provided.
But my mom didn’t have a place to go, and Evangeline Lindsley and her group of fantastic women started Daybreak because she said they used to put kids in jail that they just didn’t know what to do with. So, my mom just fended for herself at age 16 on her own and had a lifestyle of instability for someone who was on their own so young in the ‘60s before she had opportunities that women have today.
She didn’t have an education, so her lifestyle was that she worked in bars, and she just had a hard life. She had some addiction issues that stemmed from some of her spiritual issues and lack of family support. As an older person now. I can see what led me to Daybreak was, unfortunately, what started in her life.
There was a moment in time when I actually needed to leave my home. I was 15 years old, and I’ll just never forget, we were living in this one-bedroom apartment, sharing it. She was in between trying to divorce the one guy that she married that was just awful in her life and she had this anxiety that she was self-treating. He would come and visit her and give her pills to help her but the pills he got were from some guy he knew that were prescribed to him for an adult body mass and she was this teeny tiny woman. So, she took these pills to calm her down and she’d be passed out on the couch all the time. For a 15-year-old to see your mom incapacitated—there’s a number of things. I went to a different school every year of my life, there are things building along the way. I went to 10 different schools. And watching her in that moment, I knew I had to do something.
I was one of those traditional kids that climbed out the window of their house and ran away like you would picture. At least that was my picture, and I ended up at Daybreak. They let me stay there for a couple of weeks at the time because it was built differently. We didn’t have all the services that are there now.
I remember they got intervention involved. My mom dressed up in a suit and came down and was like, “Why would she want to stay here?”
It was alarming to me that she couldn’t see it, but she put on such an act that they did put me back in the home after a couple weeks. In that couple of weeks’ time frame, Daybreak was really pivotal in keeping me stable. I know that’s one of your questions.
Right, yeah. What services gave you that stability?
So, the services now are so much different because we have a campus, and we have mental health services, and we have employment services and independent living scenarios that can help.
I was 15 at the time, so I was a minor—I was a kid in crisis. And I was a straight-A student despite all of the instability in my life. I was a student government person, I had I had a lot of things going on for me in high school. I wasn’t what people think a bad kid is, right.
People think kids at Daybreak are bad and they’re not right. It’s super important to understand that you never know who could need the services. For me, they had this service where they give you bus tokens and make you go to school. I had to ride the regional bus service to get to school every day. They talked to my counselors. They talked to my principal. They talked to my teachers. I was expected to show up and I did.
In high school—I was able to stay in the same high school because I lied about my address because we were moving all the time. So, I gave a friend’s address and stayed in the same high school, but they were very kind to me and supportive. Having that two-week period where at least I had a respite from all of the things that were happening at home and the stresses that wouldn’t let me focus as well as normal, I was able to do my homework. I was able to keep that stability.
We had meals at regular times, I was distracted because I was doing chores, I was engaged in making dinners every night. We had different duties that we had to do. We had phone time at a certain time and those things kept my life stable in a two-week period. Think about it, if a kid misses two weeks of school, what does that do to their year?
Here I am starting out very strong academically and I end up graduating second in my class and that would have never happened if I’d had two weeks of school that I wasn’t showing up or I wasn’t able to go or I wasn’t able to be my best or I wasn’t able to study. That’s such a basic thing that we don’t think about that can interrupt and disrupt someone’s life and then change the trajectory of their life and their opportunities.
I’m really thankful that I was forced to go to school and stay in a regular routine and we had some intervention, and I was able to get back into the home for a couple of years. Then my end of my junior year of high school, another year and a half later maybe two years [from my time at Daybreak], my mom passed away from her lifestyle issues.
Unfortunately, she never got to have that same kind of intervention. She had the same potential as does everyone, but the potential can only be unleashed if a kid’s basic needs are met. It can start a cycle of it in families and I’m sure we see it in the kids at Daybreak now. Some of them have come from homes where just the parents are doing the best they can.
I’m really thankful to see how much Daybreak has grown now and what they offer. It’s remarkable and anybody that knows anything about Daybreak understands how special it is. But having lived it—only a piece of it—because even now, I’d say that’s only 20% of what we do if not less in terms of minor crisis care.
What we do now, we offer so much more, and job opportunities, mental health services, independent living. There’s so much more that we’re doing for the kids in our community from ages 10 to 24 and I’m happy to be a part of it and grateful.
Yeah, definitely! I know your story, but I hadn’t heard much about it before. I’d heard bits and pieces. It’s very inspirational to me and I didn’t know that piece about your mom. That really is something that the Daybreak youth struggle with is that cycle of families. That’s what happened with your mom, she didn’t have that support, and it can go those different ways. You are definitely a shining example of the things that are possible with that intervention and help. So, tell us a picture of your life today.
Wow! Today, I’m so blessed. I always get all choked up about it.
Everybody has their own spiritual path but I’m very grounded in my spirituality and very thankful to God for bringing me to Daybreak because of what it did for me. To understand how pivotal that was and the foundation that I needed in order to get me to where I am today. I got to go to college on a full scholarship. I got to graduate high school salutatorian. If I missed all that school, that would have never happened. I was blessed, I got an engineering degree.
I thought engineers were on the back of trains. I wasn’t raised in an environment with anyone that did anything really professional outside of being a mailman. She was the first female mailman in the Dayton area, so we were really proud of her. She was doing some stuff.
But I became educated in engineering as a woman and through my career I’ve been so blessed to get into the safety profession. I’m the environmental health and safety director for an international business for all of North America. That’s such a big moment for me—from crawling out of a window to getting to do this and having such purpose in my life and my work.
Then in my personal life I have my little cat. We just adopted a cat, and I’m married and we have three kids together and our third one is getting ready to graduate from college. All of them are exciting, fulfilling their potential in terms of their education and finding their paths in life.
I’m just really thankful to get to show up and to serve on the Daybreak board. I’ve been able to be on the Daybreak board twice now in the last 20 years. I’ve served in multiple ways and getting to be the board president for something that served my life so much is such an honor.
So, that’s life today. I get to give money away. I get to adopt an animal. I get to enjoy my kids being amazing and stable and watching them live a life that’s just so different from what I went through. It’s really rewarding in a lot of ways.
Yeah, that’s wonderful! And I’m going to speak on behalf of all of us at Daybreak, we’re very happy that you are still a part of the Daybreak community and the work that you do with us. It’s wonderful to have someone who has seen the difference. And having that advocate in our corner, we very much value you.
Thank you! That’s so kind of you. Thank you for saying that. It’s so nice to see how far it’s grown. We went from one building to this campus and apartments throughout the community and a job center next door, an opportunity zone. I’m so proud of it and there’s so much more we could do.
For sure, very true. So, if you could tell people only a couple quick things about Daybreak, what would you want them to know?
The first thing that I am a broken record about is that these aren’t bad kids. They’re kids in crisis. I wanted to bring someone down to the shelter once and the lady was scared. She was scared to come down and I was surprised by that and I thought, When you think about a runaway or a kid—they call him ‘at risk youth’ and I don’t like that word because I think that’s too prophesizing towards the negative, they’re not ‘at risk,’ they’re kids in crisis that we are pivoting to fulfill their potential.
That’s the thing I love about Daybreak. I love that they’re helping kids. It says in the catchphrase, “Changing lives Creating Futures.” For me, it’s understanding they’re not bad kids. They didn’t sign up for this and you never know what kid needs this service. You think it’s one group of kids but it’s not, it’s all kinds of kids for all kinds of reasons.
When you look at a community or our environment, our society is hurting right now in so many ways. There’s lots of anger spewed out and different beliefs and things like that. We’ve got some kids that are hurting in our community and that’s who we serve.
Yeah, I think that’s a really great distinction, the crisis, because they’re just kids.
They are and sometimes they act out because I know for me, I was always an angry kid. I would think that people that knew me in high school sometimes don’t perceive me the same way they would now because I was angry. I was an angry kid but if you look at what I was dealing with at home, I was just angry at life and the circumstances.
Some act out, some are withdrawn. There are all kinds of ways that show but it’s not like they signed up for it and they’re kids in crisis. They’re just hurting kids.
Yeah, I think that’s a really great note to end on. I really appreciate that distinction, that look at what Daybreak is, what it’s done over the years. Everyone needs a bit more stability and some people don’t have that much to start with.
They used to say all the time, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Sometimes that village includes Daybreak. You don’t want them to need it but I’m glad it’s there.