PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN – Asheville Citizen

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“Bill has a very gentle way about him,” said Valerie Collins, executive director of Helpmate, the nonprofit domestic violence agency in Buncombe County.

“What always comes through that gentleness is his deep passion for the community and for the safety and care of its children.”

Shannon McTeague-Pospishil, one of the four part-time CAPS therapists, remembers her first case after joining the nonprofit three years ago, involving two little boys who lived in extreme poverty and had no beds to sleep in.

“I couldn’t figure out what to do — beds are expensive, and you can’t just go out and buy them,” she said. “Bill didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t go into, ‘We don’t have the funding for that.’ He just said, ‘What do we need to do?’

“And that’s who Bill is — he will figure it out, no matter what it is, and he’ll go the extra mile and then some to make sure kids are provided for,” Teague-Pospishil said. “He sees the need, and he’s all over it.”

A couple of days later, McGuire called her and said, “We’ve got the beds.”

“I know he dug into his own pockets to get those beds,” she said. “Bill has the business sense, but he also has the hands-on, direct-service sense. And it changes the lives of these kids.”

John Lauterbach, longtime executive director of the non-profit Caring for Children, agreed that McGuire has an amazing ability “to look for resources when other people might give up.”

“When Bill first got to CAPS, the agency was having a hard time financially, and he managed to string together a number of resources so that not only did his program survive, but it was able to generate new programming and serve a lot more kids and families,” Lauterbach said.

Plus, he said, “Bill’s just a nice guy — he’s just good people.”

Never giving up

McGuire said he is sustained by the good people around him, not only his co-workers and fellow nonprofit leaders but his “wife and soul mate,” Roi, an artist/potter, his two sons, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren.

Roi came to the family when McGuire was single dad to Bill, then 12, and Brian, then 10, and she moved in next door to them in Mandeville, La. After nine years of what McGuire laughingly calls a “long and proper engagement,” “Bill, Brian and I married her” in 1993.

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