Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the hospital at which Gale Boonstra volunteers.
Twice a week, Gale Boonstra can be found in the Gary Pavilion Family Resource Center at the Children’s Hospital Colorado aiding parents of children with behavioral health needs like her late son, Aaron Tuneberg. The time she takes volunteering is just another way that she has worked to honor him over the past decade.
On March 31, 2014, 30-year-old Tuneberg was beaten by two men at his apartment in the 5600 block of Arapahoe Avenue before they stole his Xbox video game console and bike. Tuneberg died about a week later from his injuries.
Since his death, Boonstra has worked on several endeavors to honor him including establishing the Aaron Tuneberg Memorial Fund, lobbying at the state legislature and, most recently, starting an endowment in his name that will support the Association of Volunteers and Family Resource Center that Boonstra has been volunteering at.
“I’ve found a home, I’ve found a team, I’ve found just the most amazing place,” Boonstra said. “I feel like I have a heart to support them and love them and help them in any way I can.”
The Family Resource Center is centered around providing resources, support and space to patients’ loved ones, according to Association of Volunteers Manager of Operations Chris Goodale. Resources provided include private sleep rooms, laundry services, workspaces, snacks, self-care products and massage chairs.
Goodale said he has worked closely with Boonstra, who has been volunteering at the hospital for five years.
“The one thing I love about her is she’s never assuming about any situation,” Goodale said. “She works with these families with an open mind and free dialogue. She’s really good at recognizing when a mom or dad may be in crisis themselves and may need a private space.”
Boonstra hopes to raise an additional $10,000 for the endowment by the 10th anniversary of Tuneberg’s death on April 8. In recognition of the endowment, a painting of Tuneberg commissioned by the association hangs in the resource center.
“The family resource center had a budget for original art and they surprised our family,” Boonstra said. “They hired an artist to create a picture that is sort of a rendering of, a representative of Aaron. It’s a little boy on a bicycle riding into the mountains in the sun.”
The painting, called “Hopeful Horizons,” was done by Heather Hayes and commissioned through the Access Gallery — a Denver-based non-profit organization which provides creative, educational and economic opportunities for people with disabilities, according to their website.
The painting “Hopeful Horizons,” by artist Heather Hayes is seen inside the Family Resource Center at Children’s Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora on Monday. The painting was commissioned by the association of volunteers in honor of Gale Boonstra’s son, Aaron Tuneberg, who was killed in Boulder in 2014. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)Beyond her volunteering, Boonstra has invested in other projects like Project SEARCH at the Children’s Hospital, a vocational program for young adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The program allows students to attend classes in the morning and then shadow hospital employees in the afternoons. At the end of the one year program, the students are given the opportunity to apply to the hospital.
“They have internships and the idea is to hopefully get them jobs in the hospital when they’re done,” Boonstra said. “So I gave them a donation and the idea of that was some of these young people need to have a uniform because their internship is in the food service or they need special shoes or they have to buy their lunch in the cafeteria and their family can’t afford it, so I gave a chunk of money for that and it went really well. Then I decided I wanted to continue fundraising and take the money that we had and create an endowment.”
Boonstra also continues to advocate for the expansion of services for those with disabilities, specifically those eligible for the developmental disabilities waiver. Boonstra explained that following the 1992 approval of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the state has not prioritized the funding of services for adults with developmental disabilities.
“The needs of the state are as big as the state and the budget is as big as the building you work in, so things don’t get funded,” Boonstra said. “Adults with developmental disabilities are not a very well organized lobby, many of them end up in foster care or become homeless.”
She added, “They stopped funding these waivers. People were eligible and they just put them on a waitlist and when people would die and give up their waiver they wouldn’t give it to another person, they would take the money back into the state budget and use it for other things, also probably important stuff.”
At the time of his death, Tuneberg, who was on the waitlist, was five years away from retrieving services. Boonstra said he would have received $30,000 in services a year.
“If at 21 he had more services, the trajectory of his life would have gone in a direction where he probably would have never met those two boys that killed him,” Boonstra said. “One prong of keeping his memory a blessing is to keep that conversation alive.”
Boonstra said shortly after Tuneberg’s death she met with representatives at the state Capitol about the waitlist for developmental disability services, and she continues to meet with them today.
“We’re Jewish and we have a saying when someone dies, ‘May their memory always be a blessing’ and that’s one of my huge motivations,” Boonstra said. “May he not only be remembered as a murder victim but that something good continues to come from what happened to him and that he be remembered in a positive way and that he hopefully would be proud of me for what I’ve done in his name. I think he would.”
Those wanting to donate to the endowment can visit Tuneberg’s endowment page on the Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation website at bit.ly/43FrRLa.
