Struggling to Stay Together : Activism: Groups formed after child kidnapings and murders frequently fade away after a few years.

They are born in tragedy and nurtured on grief, frustration and anger. Their names are a roll call of children who have disappeared or died at the hands of strangers: the Kevin Collins Foundation, the Heidi Search Center, the Adam Walsh Center, the Jacob Wetterling Foundation, the Amber Foundation--and now the Polly Klaas Foundation.

In the past decade, more than a hundred such organizations have sprouted up in the wake of highly publicized child kidnapings and murders, and they are perhaps the most prolific of the so-called victims’ rights groups. More are created every year as other children--an estimated 3,200 to 4,600 yearly--become victims of kidnaping by strangers.

All the groups start out in much the same way: a child disappears, and scores or hundreds or even thousands of volunteers turn out to help in the search. Because of the circumstances of the kidnaping or just plain luck, the case attracts extensive local, regional or--as with the Klaas case--national media attention. Sometimes the child is never found; sometimes the child is found dead. In the aftermath, the parents or the volunteers form a nonprofit group to try to “do something” about child abductions.

“There’s so much intensity put into a search that there has to be an outlet for it,” says Rick Benningfield, operations director for the Heidi Search Center in San Antonio, Tex., a “child find” group named after 11-year-old Heidi Seeman, kidnaped in San Antonio in August, 1990, and later found dead. “Even after the body is found, it’s emotionally difficult to call off the search. Then you look around and you see that there’s a need for an organization to help deal with the problem. So you keep going.”

“Most of these organizations are formed out of personal loss,” says Judi Sadowsky, executive director of L.A.-based Find the Children, a missing child assistance center founded in 1983. “When a child is missing, the frustration is so great that parents and families often feel the emotional need to get involved in starting an organization. Usually these are ordinary people who’ve been thrust into an extraordinary situation. Some can rise to it, and some can’t.”

Most of the groups fade away after a couple of years. Although no one keeps track of all the child victim organizations nationwide, people in the field estimate that at least half the groups formed in the wake of a child disappearance in the past 10 years have closed their doors as the money dried up and volunteers moved on. Others remain as not much more than numbers for phones that may or may not be answered.

Even the groups that survive find that usually there comes a time when the attention--and thus the money and volunteers--shifts to another tragedy involving a kidnaped child.

“A lot of it depends on how committed the parents and the volunteers are to continuing the work,” says Julie Cartwright of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Va., a national clearinghouse for information and programs involving missing children. “It takes all your time, and all your emotional energy, and every new case (of a kidnaped child) reopens the wound. Often it’s difficult to keep up the momentum.”

Still, some groups manage to continue long after the tragedy that created them.

Gary French, president of the fledgling Polly Klaas Foundation, is certain that his organization will be one of them.

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It’s been just more than a month since the body of 12-year-old Polly Klaas was found, nine weeks after she was abducted from a pajama party at her home in Petaluma near San Francisco. But the emotional adrenaline of the case lingers.

At the Polly Klaas Foundation, a 6,000-square-foot office in a shopping center across the street from the Petaluma police station, the phones still ring off the hook, hundreds of volunteers still put in long hours, donations still pour in--as much as $500,000 so far. The foundation board of directors, which includes Polly’s parents, is formulating plans for legislative and educational programs to “make America safe for children.” The national media still call.

“It’s not going to taper off,” French, 48, says confidently. “Of all those other (child victim) organizations that came before, none has had the national and international visibility that we have had. It gives us capabilities that they simply didn’t have.”

There have been some stumbles. The first head of the foundation resigned after it was disclosed that he had been convicted of a sex crime involving minors in 1967.

Also, members of other child find groups, a number of whom assisted in the Polly search, say privately that the unprecedented media attention in the Klaas case has created arrogance among some Klaas Foundation organizers.

“They’re walking around acting like a bunch of movie stars,” says the director of one long-established missing child foundation, who declined to be quoted by name.

“I don’t know about arrogance on our part,” French responds. “I know we’re aware of the tremendous power and influence we have. . . . As far as all of it going to our heads, what’s gone to our heads is the ability to make significant changes to benefit every kid, and every missing kid, in this country. That’s what we want to do.”

Despite the criticism, the Klaas Foundation organizers believe that their group will not only survive but prosper. They believe that it may even surpass in scope the most successful of the child victim organizations, the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Florida, which has three other regional branches, including one in Orange County. (The group is named after 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who was abducted and murdered in Florida in 1981; the case became the basis for the 1983 TV film “Adam.”)

In 10 years, French predicts, “I think we could be one of the premier providers of services to children in this country.”

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As a man committed to saving children, 54-year-old David Collins wishes the Polly Klaas Foundation well--in fact, he spent many hours as a volunteer during the search for Polly. But he also knows that there almost certainly will come a time when the phones at the Polly Klaas Center won’t ring as often, a time when the group may have to fight for funding, a time when they may be begging the national media for interviews instead of the other way around.

Collins knows because he’s been there.

Next month will mark 10 years since Collins’ son, 10-year-old Kevin Collins, was abducted from a street corner near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. In the beginning, it was much the same as the Klaas case. Within a week almost a thousand volunteers had showed up to help in the search; the search center, situated in space donated by a local church, was frantic with activity.

Kevin’s face was on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Donations poured in. Other parents of missing children started calling, and within a few months, Collins had set up the Kevin Collins Foundation for Missing Children, dedicated to preventing “stranger abductions” of children (as opposed to the far more prevalent “family abductions” of children by a non-custody parent).

Kevin was never found.

Now, a decade later, the Kevin Collins Foundation operates out of a 3,000-square-foot “boiler room” in the San Francisco Tenderloin District. About five volunteers continue to help on a weekly basis. The foundation’s annual budget, about $95,000, is a little more than half what it once was. Collins, the foundation president, earns about $11,000 a year as the group’s only paid staff member. One of the group’s most recent statewide media exposures was a wire service report that the foundation was closing its doors--a report denied by Collins.

“I’m tired, but I’m not dejected,” says Collins, who is resigned to the idea that his son is probably dead. “(The foundation is) going to be here until we’re not needed any more.”

The group has accomplished a great deal. It has offered support to scores of parents of missing children; sent response teams to assist in numerous child disappearances; distributed millions of flyers of missing children--Kevin included--and pushed for laws to aggressively track and more severely punish child molesters.

Still, Collins admits that sometimes it is difficult to keep up the momentum, both in raising funds and in attracting volunteers--not only for his group but for others in the same situation.

“I’ve seen all kinds of groups spring up in the past 10 years and then a year later they’re gone,” Collins says. “Sometimes it’s hard to keep going.”

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“Money’s the real problem,” says Kim Swartz, 36, of the Amber Foundation for Missing Children in Pinole, Calif. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve sat up at night thinking, ‘Are we going to have to close our doors tomorrow?’ Fortunately, it seems like a miracle always happens and we keep going.”

Swartz is the mother of Amber Swartz, an 8-year-old girl kidnaped in Pinole in June, 1988. She has not been seen since. For Swartz, whose police officer husband was killed in the line of duty while she was pregnant with Amber, the child’s disappearance, and trying to keep the foundation alive, has been an emotional roller coaster.

“For days and days after (Amber’s disappearance), there were crowds of volunteers at the command center,” Swartz recalls. “There were just hundreds of people, and you’re at the center of it. Your whole life becomes an open book, and sometimes you just want to be somebody else.

“It brings out all kinds of people, the good and the bad. I got calls from people who would tell me what they were doing to my daughter right at that moment. The vast majority of the volunteers were wonderful, caring people, but some strange people show up on your doorstep.”

The Amber Foundation, which assists in child search operations and distributes missing child information, operates with a small, $25,000 annual budget and a core group of about a dozen volunteers. There are no paid staff members. Swartz also is working to create the American Missing and Exploited Children Organization, an umbrella association for missing child foundations like hers.

“There’s got to be a way for us to all work together,” Swartz says. “The way it is now, every time a child is missing and people want to organize a group, you wind up reinventing the wheel.”

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“There’s a high rate of burnout,” says Patty Wetterling, 44, a founder and board member of the Jacob Wetterling Foundation. “You don’t have a very high success rate in terms of finding a child, so it’s easy to become discouraged. And if another child is kidnaped, many of those caring people who volunteer move on to that one.”

It’s been more than four years since Wetterling’s then-11-year-old son, Jacob, was kidnaped by an armed, masked man half a mile from Jerry and Patty Wetterling’s home in St. Joseph, Minn., a small town of 3,000 about 85 miles northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Despite a $200,000 reward, the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of flyers bearing Jacob’s picture and a lot of national media attention, he has not been seen since.

Today, the foundation, which emphasizes education to prevent child abductions and has fought for a national convicted child molester registration act, has an annual budget of about $188,000, a full-time staff of three--including Patty Wetterling, who is not paid--and a core of about 20 volunteers.

“I would encourage parents (of missing children) to get involved in the issue, but I’m not sure I would encourage parents to start a foundation,” Wetterling says. “It’s very difficult, emotionally and organizationally.”

Nevertheless, she adds, “I do gain some strength from working to help other children. It gives me a way to put energy into something positive.

“And I never give up hope that Jacob will be found.”