As of this year, Erin Bierzychudek is the new secretary for the Riverside Junior Woman’s Charity. But before she was a member of the group, she was new in town, a recent emigrant from Canada, and didn’t know where to start with getting to know people.
“I was like, ‘How am I going to meet people, and how am I going to make friends?’ I was six months pregnant, and people here don’t get family or parental leave like they do in Canada,” she told the Landmark. “I posted on our neighborhood Facebook group saying, ‘I need friends,’ and another mom also named Erin was like, ‘Hey, we should totally hang out, but, also, you should join this thing.’ I had just happened to get a handwritten note in the mail the same week inviting me to come to a Juniors meeting.”
Bierzychudek and other members of the 2026-2027 board of directors described the group, known as Juniors for short, as having a three-pronged purpose: bringing together women in town to form social bonds with their neighbors while completing service projects to improve the community and raising funds for philanthropic redistribution across the area.
“We’re able to draw in a lot of members because they’re either new to the community or they really want to spend time with others, but through the lens of a shared purpose … It’s not just a bunch of ladies getting together and grabbing a glass of wine,” said Michelle Montgomery, the vice president of operations. “There’s not a lot of outlets for women here aside from mom groups, right? What if you’re not a mother? What if you’re interested in connecting with other women around something else other than motherhood?”
Many members of the board, who were newly elected in August, shared similar reasons for joining the inner group that focuses Juniors’ efforts.
“I joined the board my second year in Juniors. I joined as the treasurer, and I got involved mainly because I can’t say no,” said Lauren Wilt, the president of the organization. “I actually had said that I would be willing to get reinvolved on the board [more recently], and they approached me and asked if I would like to be president, which is such an honor and such a compliment from these women who I’ve always looked up to.”
Juniors got its start nearly 100 years ago in 1937, when Riverside resident Lorraine Bender sought to create a young women’s club and recruited 34 other members. By the 1940s, the junior woman’s club got its service-oriented tilt, with members wrapping bandages for the local Red Cross to support the United States’ war effort during World War II. The group only expanded from there, shifting throughout the decades as new traditions and rules were adopted or fell to the wayside. A detailed history is available on the group’s website.
In 2009, the organization became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and a formal charity, working to improve the quality of life in Riverside and identify the needs it could fill in the lives of the village’s residents.
Each year, Juniors requires its members to pay $50 in dues and commit to a minimum number of service hours, either through participating in one of its committees with special focuses like membership, kindness, or planning one of its many events, or through volunteering for an event or other effort. And each year, the group hosts one main fundraiser, after which they distribute much of the funds to different causes, including donations to other local groups. Next spring, that fundraiser will take the form of a trivia night.
Earlier this year, the group hosted Derby Night to coincide with the Kentucky Derby. Last year’s fundraising effort raised about $19,000, Bierzychudek said, enabling Juniors to give out $30,000 at the end of the 2024-25 season. Funds that don’t go directly into the pockets of other groups often go toward other philanthropic efforts, she said.
“Two years ago, we paid off the school lunch debt for [Riverside School District] 96,” she said.
When Juniors does something, members of the community often take notice, Bierzychudek added.
“The neighborhood found out that this had happened, and the neighborhood ended up paying it off instead [last year]. They did a whole drive,” she said. “They realized through that process that all the kids who had free and reduced lunch throughout the year don’t get that funding through the summer, so Ascension Church and some local fundraising happened to build a program so they could give out free food, free breakfast and lunch, throughout the summer for any of the kids that qualified.”
She described Juniors as the connective tissue between different groups and parts of Riverside’s wider community that allows them to work together and become more aware of each other.
“It’s funny how these things happen, that we can make a need known through our philanthropic giving, and then it’s like, oh wait, the community says this is a thing that we could already be doing,” Bierzychudek said. “We really tie different people in the community together in a way that they wouldn’t have necessarily connected.”
