The proposed $4 million community center on
Springfield’s east side has entered its next phase of planning, says
Boys & Girls Club executive director Kristin Allen. Allen says that her organization, working with the
Ministerial Alliance, has defined several areas of service that the new
building will provide, including programs aimed at senior citizens,
educational and career development, sports, and recreation. Now, she says, they will “identify major
entities to provide these services.”
Representatives of the Boys & Girls Club and the
Ministerial Alliance have met with Mayor Timothy Davlin to discuss how the
city of Springfield can help. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin got the ball rolling in
February, announcing a $750,000 federal grant to provide the initial
funding. Tension arose early on between the Boys & Girls
Club, which had been tapped to lead the project, and the Ministerial
Alliance, but the
dispute was quickly resolved [Todd Spivak, “Moving forward,”
March 10]. The Rev. Silas Johnson of Calvary Baptist Church says
that the two groups “worked things out for the good of the
community.”
Johnson says that he would like to see the new center
serve the community as a whole, a place where community members could also
hold such events as wedding receptions and family reunions. Since the two groups settled their differences,
“there is a positive, cooperative working relationship,” Allen
says. Once the public and private partners are in place, the
planning committee will find a site somewhere east of Ninth Street for the
10-acre complex, which will be similar to a community center in Rockford.
It made more sense, Allen says, to first establish the
programs and partners before settling on where to build so that planners
could ensure that the site will accommodate all the services they want to
provide, as well as future expansion. Wherever the new center is built, Allen says,
environmental, safety, and accessibility issues must also be taken into
account. Although the list of possible sites has been narrowed
down, specific sites are not being discussed publicly; Allen is concerned
about the “economic ramifications of expressing interest in a
particular property.”
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2005.
