After watching an episode of “Returning the Favor” in 2018, Brian Nelson felt inspired to help address an issue in his community.
The episode spotlighted the work of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a national nonprofit that builds beds for children. It was then that Nelson, vice president of Kenosha-based Bane-Nelson Inc., first learned of child bedlessness.
“I thought about my own kids – I have a son and a daughter – and I just started thinking, what would that look like? How would that affect them, if they had to sleep on the floor or on a pile of blankets or something every night?” Nelson said. “It just really stuck with me.”
About a week later, Nelson read in a news article that a man named Mike Prudhom was launching a local chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Nelson called the phone number provided in the article and offered Bane-Nelson’s facility to Prudhom as a build day location for the chapter.
“Neither of us understood the magnitude of what the problem really was,” said Nelson, who now serves as co-president of the chapter. “We had this idea that we build 10 or 15 beds. We’d have a bunch of people come out, we build this bed, we deliver them and we’d be on our way. And the requests just started coming in.”
The chapter initially served Racine and Kenosha east of Highway 45, but it has since expanded to serve all of Racine and Kenosha counties.
To qualify for Sleep in Heavenly Peace’s program, the child in need must be between 3 and 17 years old and not have a proper bed, Nelson said.
As of early January, the local chapter has delivered more than 3,200 beds since its founding. It also exceeded its goal to build and deliver 700 beds to children in Racine and Kenosha by the end of 2025. The chapter ultimately delivered 889 beds last year and, for the first time since its founding, cleared its waitlist.
Each year, the chapter carries a waitlist for beds into the following year, and that waitlist typically ranges from 75 to 160 beds, Nelson said.
“This is the first year we were able to close out our waitlist,” Nelson said. “It’s sobering that there’s that many kids that need those beds. That’s the sobering part of it, is that we exceeded the goal of 700 beds because we had to, because there were that many kids that needed beds.”
Between 30 to 40 children are requesting beds from the chapter per month, “so that’s indicative of what the problem is in our area,” Nelson said.
The chapter builds beds, which cost about $250 to make, on weekends when the Bane-Nelson facility is not in use. Anywhere between 20 and 150 community volunteers come in to help build.
Sleep in Heavenly Peace also accepts donations for pillows and other bedding items.
What’s important to Nelson is that children are sleeping better because of his team’s efforts, he said.
Teachers have told Nelson’s team that they can see the difference in their students who can sleep at night now that they have a bed.
“Hearing stories like that – that’s the reason I do it,” Nelson said. “To hear that their lives are changing for the better … knowing that there are kids who are better off because of the efforts that we’ve made.”
Nelson and his wife, Lori, are also volunteers for Sleep in Heavenly Peace’s national build team.
Over the years, Nelson has been involved with the Boy Scouts of America, Daybreak Church and Kemper Center and helped build the Kenosha Dream Playground as a volunteer. Bane-Nelson also donated equipment to help build the playground.
“The reward for helping with any volunteer endeavor should be the successful completion of the mission,” Nelson said. “In the case of SHP, happy kids with a bed of their own is the ultimate reward. Seeing a kid’s face light up when they see their very own or first bed after sleeping on the floor is evidence of a mission completed. It warms your heart and fills a very important need in that child’s life. Our reward isn’t for us, it’s for the kids we serve – the feeling in our hearts after serving them is just an added bonus.”
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