Community centers gear up for summer

At Westside Community Center, volunteers and employees have been busy painting the walls and pasting up giant paper sunflowers. The improvements are just the beginning of a host of renovations and new programs at the center.

Just three months ago, Westside and three other community centers were slated for closure.

But a local church took over operations at Westside, and city leaders agreed to keep the three other centers open — though with much smaller budgets.

All are gearing up for summer programs, which began this week.

At Westside, Director Dick Siever  has big plans for the center. He hopes to carpet many of the rooms, pave over a dirt parking lot, plant a community garden and redo the basketball court.  For most of the renovations, the center will rely on donations of carpet, paint,  asphalt  and the like from local businesses, as well as support from donors.  

Even including improvements, the center’s new business model will allow Westside to operate with a budget of around $220,000, compared to its $360,000 budget last year. 

The central idea is to depend on volunteers, donations and partnerships to cut costs.    

“This is a different model, and funding organizations have expressed an interest because we’re not dependent on government funds to be successful,” Siever said.

The center is also saving money by making all activity instructors independent contractors rather than part-time employees and chipping away at the $32,000 utility bill by turning off unnecessary lights and better regulating heating in the winter.

In programming, Westside hopes to develop an art program, a work force skill development program and a healthcare program with Peak Vista Community Health Centers. This summer, Westside has added a reading mentor program and a teen program, Siever said.

Otherwise, summer programming will be almost the same as last year at all of the community centers.

At the city-owned centers, though, maintaining programming has been especially difficult, said Brian Kates, facility director at Meadows Park Community Center. Budgets have shrunk drastically. According Kim King, the city’s parks administration manager, Hillside, Meadows Park and Deerfield Hills community centers have a combined budget of $766,695 this year, down from $1,316,207 in 2008, a 42 percent decrease.  

The community centers provide free and affordable programs and resources for the surrounding neighborhoods, including recreation services, after-school activities, meals and care for seniors, and summer programming for kids and teens.  In 2009, Westside served 55,000 people, while the three city-owned centers served a combined 173,400 people, according to King.  

After originally voting to close all four community centers this year to save money, the City Council decided late last year to keep the centers open through March 31 to give them time to raise money. In late March, Westside Community Center LLC, which is associated with Woodmen Valley Chapel, agreed to take over ownership of Westside Community Center under a three-year agreement and took over operations May 1. Meanwhile, the city tapped into reserves to extend funding for the other three centers until the end of the year only.

The centers were aided by a two-year $250,000 grant from the U.S. Olympic Committee awarded in April. The El Pomar Foundation kicked in $20,000 more to help keep the centers open and city employees are also pursuing individual donations for their respective centers.

In terms of future funding, the city-owned centers are considering partnerships with private organizations similar to that at Westside, Kates said.  

Finding a capable nonprofit to serve as an umbrella agency is the option that councilman Sean Paige said he sees as the most sustainable solution.  

“These are fairly big ticket items, and I never believed we could run them strictly on donations,” he said.

Kates supports a public-private partnership where the city would pay for fixed costs like utility bills, while community center coordinators would be responsible for finding funding for services like meal programs, exercise classes and medical services as well as volunteer support.

The latter option, he said, would allow the centers to continue being city entities, and keep experienced city staff onboard.

“We have that customer base and the institutional knowledge so we can maintain operations the way they are currently maintained,” he said. “(City ownership) also brings more buy-in from the community into the centers.”

For now, community center staffers are working hard to maintain existing services while also searching for a new business model.  

“It’s very challenging, but it’s what we have to do, there’s no use whining about it,” Kates said.  “We’re being stretched and that’s an understatement.”  

—
Contact the writer at 636-0187.