One good turn leads to many more

What goes around comes around. The law of attraction. Cast your bread upon the waters. However you want to phrase it, Joan Hellstrom has a story to tell that illustrates the principle beautifully.

Joan is event coordinator for Picabo's Ski Challenge, an annual fundraising event in Park City that supports the National Children's Alliance, an advocacy organization for abused children.

Outside her family, food, air and maybe a good heater in the winter, nothing in this world is closer to Joan's heart than the cause that fights against child abuse and the slime who would perpetrate it. She knows abuse crosses all social and economic fences and it that it occurs more than we'd sometimes care to realize. She knows that one in four girls and one in six boys will be touched inappropriately by the time they are 18. She knows when kids say something happened, 99 percent of the time they are telling the truth.

Knowing all this means she really knows how important it is that abused children have somebody looking out for them.

She was introduced to the National Children's Alliance shortly after the organization was formed in 1985 by a prosecutor in Alabama who saw a critical need for shelters where abused children can find sanctuary and where the government agencies working their cases — police, lawyers and state social workers — can interact with the kids without further victimizing them.

Thus began the network of nonprofit Children's Advocacy Centers that 23 years later criss-cross the nation by the hundreds. In Utah there are 15 such facilities — for some reason, they are called Children's Justice Centers here — that dot the state from one end to the other.

At the turn of the century, Joan went to work full time for NCA, leaving behind a career in the public sector that included stints as a Weber County Commissioner and as a statewide developmental coordinator with the Utah Attorney General's office.

At about this same time, with excitement building for the upcoming 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Utah, she decided one day to watch a pre-Olympic ski race at Snowbasin Resort, a short drive from her Trapper's Loop home.

The Idaho ski racer Picabo Street had long been one of Hellstrom's favorites. One of her goals that day was to at least catch a glimpse of the Olympic champion.

As it turned out, she did better than that.