For 50 years, the Christian Opportunity Center has been providing a guiding hand to people with disabilities in Pella and the rest south central Iowa. The organization celebrated the occasion during the group’s annual Golf Classic and at Thursdays in Pella. Bruce Nikkel was COC Director from 1973 to 1976, and has served on the board and as a volunteer in the decades since, and says many of the children they first brought to COC in the early years remain members of the Pella community and stay in contact.

“We became an agency through social services through the counties and state social services to license foster homes, so we already then began taking in children from outside of the area, and we did take a few kids out of the state institutions out of Woodward and Glenwood, that came to reside in foster homes here and attended school at Christian Opportunity Center,” he recalls. “Some of those young people, they were children then, are now adults in the community and I go to church with them every Sunday.”

Nikkel says the development of Christian Opportunity Center was a community effort to better educate and care for people with intellectual and physical disabilities.

Stay tuned to 92.1 KRLS, as coming up Monday and Tuesday, Dr. Bob Leonard sits down with the current and former directors of COC to share their memories of 50 years of an organization on In Depth.