Cooper County Raises Nearly $28,000 for Its First Safe Haven Baby Box

Cooper County is getting its first Safe Haven Baby Box, and the community paid for it in full. A grassroots fundraising push led by Valerie Gamel and Nikki Ueligger has brought in almost $28,000 — enough to cover not just the box itself, but the construction and installation costs to put it in.

The box will go inside the Cooper County Ambulance District headquarters in Boonville, in a temperature-controlled room, with installation planned for October 1. It’ll be Missouri’s 16th Safe Haven Baby Box. Until now, mid-Missouri has had just three: in Camdenton, Jefferson City, and Osage. Most of the state’s other boxes are concentrated around St. Louis and Kansas City, so this one closes a real gap on the map for families in our part of the state.

For anyone unfamiliar with how they work: a Safe Haven Baby Box lets a parent who feels they cannot safely care for a newborn surrender the baby anonymously and legally, no questions asked. The box has its own alarm system, and Cooper County EMS Chief Brandon Hicks — who helped line up the county’s support for the project — says it’s built so that once a baby is placed inside, responders are alerted within about a minute.

Gamel has said the project traces back to a 2025 news story about an abandoned baby, which is what got her looking into whether Cooper County could have a safe-surrender option of its own. From there, the fundraising effort grew to cover engineering and installation work handled by LWR Services Group and Vertex Communications, on top of the box itself.

It’s the kind of project that only works because a lot of people decided it mattered enough to chip in — and by installation day, Cooper County families will have a legal, anonymous option that didn’t exist here before.