FOLLANSBEE - Family Connections Inc. will hold its fifth annual There's No Place Like Home dinner-dance at 6 p.m. Saturday at the St. Francis Centre, 805 Lee Road.
The event will include dinner, dancing to music by disc jockey Bobby LaRosa a 50/50 drawing, silent auction and door prizes.
Tickets are $25 per person. Proceeds will benefit the adolescent girls living at Brooke Place, Family Connections' residential facility. A cash bar will be available.
To make reservations, call Rose LaRosa, the home's director, at (304) 527-3303 or e-mail her at brookeplace@familyconnectionsinc.org.
The theme for the event is one the group home also has adopted and suggested by the late Rosemarie Bragg, LaRosa's mother.
Girls at Brooke Place are encouraged to think of their stay there as a journey.
Inspired by L. Frank Baum's classic, "The Wizard of Oz," Brooke Place's staff encourage the girls to use their hearts to learn compassion for others and to form positive relationships; to use their brains to consider the consequences of their actions and make good decisions; and to use courage to change their behavior when they return to their homes.
It's customary for each girl, as she prepares to leave Brooke Place, to share, as much as they wish, any changes they have undergone and to be presented a necklace with a pendant in the shape of Dorothy's famous ruby slippers.
Girls come to the home from various parts of the state.
Sometimes it's because of their negative behavior at home or school, but often they are removed from their homes for their protection while their parents undergo counseling, staff at Brooke Place said.
