ROCK FALLS — Devon Nicklaus and Emily Juist have a lot on their plates, but they know not everyone is lucky enough to say the same.

That’s why the Rock Falls couple decided to fill other people’s plates, helping put holiday dinners on dozens of families’ tables — that is, when they weren’t raising a family, Devon wasn’t running his construction business, and Emily wasn’t busy doling out dough from her business.

Even with so many tasks tugging at their time, they managed to get pretty good at keeping all those plates spinning, but they still felt like they could do more — so they did. Now they’re getting ready to put even more on their plates and help even more people.

It can a be lot of work lending a hand to those in need, but for Devon and Emily, it’s a labor of love.

A couple years ago, the couple were looking for a way to give back to their community, and that’s when they decided on the idea of providing a holiday meal for local families. In 2023, they prepared Thanksgiving dinners for 15 families, with help from the Sauk Valley Food Pantry, students in Sauk Valley Community College’s Impact program and other local businesses and organizations.

It was a gift that kept on giving.

A month later they did the same thing, this time for Christmas. They repeated their effort last year and plan to do the same this year, and that got them thinking about the next step they would take in their mission to give back, and that led them down another path. They set up the Path to the Future, a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation earlier this year and they’re working on programs through that foundation to help give children school supplies and find career avenues in trade jobs.

It’s fitting their first steps began with a Thanksgiving meal, because the thanks they got spurred them to keep giving.

“After Thanksgiving, which was just our initial start, we realized how big of an impact that had on the community and how good it was,” Nicklaus said. “After we were delivering the meals, we were getting responses back like, ‘Thank you so much,’ ‘It means so much,’ and things like that. The gratitude that was there made me realize that this was a need, and this is what we need to do. This is our calling, and we’re going to do it. Right away, we knew we had to do more and we did that for Christmas.”

When the couple delivered their first Thanksgiving meals to homes – which consisted of a choice of ham or turkey, green bean casserole, rolls, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and stuffing – some of the most cherished reactions came from the families’ children. Lasagna has been the main course for the Christmas dinners, which have helped around 45 families each year.

“Some of the kids made us bracelets and sent cards,” Juist said. “We had kids jumping up and down saying, ‘Our food is here!’ It hit home that it was making an impact, and we had to continue to do that.”

Nicklaus grew up in Dixon and has owned Nicklaus Construction since 2021, working on home remodeling projects and air duct cleaning. Juist is from Clinton, Iowa, and owns a home-based business, Tastefully Baked, making cakes, cookies and other sweet treats, as well as the pumpkin pies they serve on Thanksgiving.

The couple, who’s been dating for four years, also raise Devon’s son Jakob and their daughter Jessi, both of who’ve helped inspire them to keep giving back.

“We have a 3-year-old daughter, and her laughter and her smile — it doesn’t matter what kind of day you’re having — just lights up your day,” Nicklaus said. “A child’s laughter is very heartwarming, and any time you see a child laughing, smiling, anything, it just makes you feel good. It just makes me want to do this more.”

Jakob has helped the couple with deliveries, and Juist enjoys seeing him experience first-hand the impact helping others can make.

“He was able to witness first-hand the families, delivering the meals with me and seeing their reaction,” Juist said. “It was like a learning curve for him, as a teenager, saying that this is why we’re doing it.”

Nicklaus said he “thought it would be cool” to make a meal for someone struggling during the holidays, and Juist was all in favor of it. Since they started doing it, they’ve prepared around 150 meals to help families for the holidays — and they get some help themselves, too. They utilize the Greater Sterling Development Corp.’s Kitchen Incubator of Northwest Illinois to make the meals, find out which families are in need with help from the Lee-Ogle-Whiteside Regional Office of Education and YMCA, and recruit high school students to help prepare the meals for delivery — those students are enrolled in SVCC’s Impact Program, which is a community service endeavor that helps them earn tuition credit there.

As their efforts to address food insecurity in their community continued, Nicklaus has learned a few things along the way. When the first Thanksgiving idea was hatched, he had hoped to order more turkeys than the 15 he eventually ended up with, but it was so close to the holiday that that posed a problem. When this past Thanksgiving rolled around, he lined up enough whole turkeys in advance to feed nearly 40 families.

Not only has the couple provided opportunities for high-schoolers to pay for college through their giving, but they’re also working on more ways to help teens build career paths, including The Path to the Future foundation. The couple will have a kickoff event to promote it at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 24 at the Rock Falls Community Building. More information on the foundation can be found on its Facebook page.

“We still want to keep giving back with the meals, and our mission will be more geared toward ensuring children find the right path that they want to go in order to be successful in life with the resources or whatever else they need,” Nicklaus said.

If students don’t see traditional school studies as being right for them, avenues toward getting into the trades is something the foundation can help with. Nicklaus can relate. As a teen, he enjoyed building trades and metals classes more than classroom learning, he said.

“We want to open the door to that a little bit,” he added. “The whole cookie-cutter mindset of, ‘This is the way you need to learn and this is how you’re going to do it’ doesn’t fit for every kid. So we want to make sure that every kid has all of the opportunities available to them. We want to help them be successful, and help them reach their goals as much as we can.”

Giving back to the community is a tradition in the Nicklaus family. Devon’s father Brett, owner of Trinity Insurance and Financial Services in Dixon, and his wife Julie have a nonprofit foundation of their own, Trinity Cares, that raises money for the Lee County Honor Flight and lunch money for students in Dixon Public Schools. Juist has also donated proceeds from the sales of her baked goods toward support for breast cancer awareness and suicide prevention.

“This year is going to be the most impactful,” Devon said, and as long as the smiles and excitement of people continue to resonate in the couple’s minds, they’ll be reminded of how important it is to give back to the community they love.

“We do what we do because we want to be heavily involved in the community, whether it’s helping people improve their homes or helping with people’s parties desserts, and my career side with helping small businesses grow,” Juist said. “We like being out there in the community and helping them, whatever it takes.”