In just an hour on a weekday, everything that Teen Turf does and is for the community of Amboy is on full display.

Eileen Piper, the founder and executive director of the youth organization, is already at the Boehle Youth Center on West Main Street in Amboy.

She is on the phone, planning multiple fundraisers that help pay the bills for Teen Turf. Among those calls, she takes a call from a local social service agency asking for help for a mother with children who needs help starting over in their own house. They will need everything, the agency tells Piper, from beds to linens, silverware and pots and pans.

Her husband, Larry, who helped found the organization, came in earlier to turn the furnace up. He is there, working on various maintenance projects on the former implement store that he helped remodel, and helping unload donations of everything from clothing to kitchen goods.

Volunteers, like Bonny Faivre, arrive. Faivre, a retired nurse, is at Teen Turf every day, leading the third and fourth-grade after-school program. She also is designing and printing raffle tickets for the Teen Turf Valentine’s Day basket silent auction.

Just out front, people stop by to drop off and pick up food items from the little mini food pantry, an outdoor food pantry that stocks perishable and non-perishable food.

On a table, bags of clothing, donated by members of the local community, wait to be sorted.

Just after 2 p.m., volunteers for Teen Turf’s after-school program start arriving. Some go into the kitchen to start preparing the meal for the kids who participate in the program. Other volunteers stop by to drop off home-baked cupcakes.

“It’s become a hub for the community. We do so many different things, and we are so many different things for the community,” said Amber Horner, a volunteer and Piper’s assistant.

What started as a way to continue high school dances following football games has grown into an organization that serves the community in many ways.

“My mom always used to say if you’re not willing to help make a change, don’t complain,” Eileen Piper said.

In the mid-1990s, Piper was trying to find a way to continue a tradition of post-football game dances. Her son and daughter were in high school, and the school’s administration had stopped the dances.

“I was running it in my head that we should have the dances at the church hall,” said Piper, who is a longtime member of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. She was undeterred by naysayers who said teenagers wouldn’t show up at a dance at a church hall.

“I asked the priest, Father Frank, and he said sure. The first one was just our kids and their friends, but the kids kept coming to the dances. There wasn’t anything else to do back then,” she said.

When her son asked to stay after school to help a high school football teammate study for a test, Piper had the seed of an idea for another program.

“I called the school to make sure they were there. They said yep, the boys are all sitting there with him, helping him. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t Amboy have some kind of after-school program?’ ” Piper said.

The name for Teen Turf came from the same priest who permitted the dances.

“We were meeting, and I asked the kids to come up with some ideas for names for the group. He came in and said, ‘I thought it had a name. Teen Turf. It’s a bunch of teens, and it’s their turf.’ So that’s where Teen Turf came from,” she said.

The Boehle Youth Center is a former farm implement dealership that Teen Turf purchased in 1998 after Piper approached the woman who had the building for sale. The route to paying off the building, which was achieved in 2002, was not easy.

“It was not simple, and a lot of people were very generous,” she said. Fundraisers, from dances to selling 50-pound bags of potatoes and donations, paid the building off.

The after-school program is now the cornerstone of Teen Turf’s programs.

The program serves students in third grade through high school and runs Monday through Thursday – anywhere from 20 to 40 students attend each day. Parents need to register students for the program, which is free for families.

The program emphasizes homework, with volunteers like Faivre and Horner staying in communication with teachers to find out which students need help with which subjects or assignments, including lessons on basic life skills. Faivre, Horner and the other volunteers who oversee homework take their assignments seriously.

“We get a lot of teacher referrals, and we get permission from the parents to visit the teachers every week to see what the kids need. I use computer programs to make quizzes and games and lessons, including on basics like how to wash your hands, how to take a bath, how to brush your teeth. Anything the teachers tell me, I can convert it into a game, and there are different ways for the kids to play,” Faivre said.

Faivre said she sees her work at Teen Turf with the next generation as important to the community as a whole.

“My husband and I are from Amboy. Amboy is important to us, and we want everyone here to succeed, and this is a big deal, to be able to do this,” she said.