ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
February 17, 2005
Community center seeks funds to expand facility
Jeremy Schwab
Dancers pound across the floor above; their loud thumping echoes
in Andrea Kaiser’s cramped office. In the lobby just outside
her door, a makeshift classroom demarcated by a folding partition
houses youngsters bent over science projects.
Children and teenagers crowd into every available room of the
Bird Street Community Center in Upham’s Corner each day
after school lets out. The 100-year-old structure, with its steep,
winding staircases, small gymnasium and limited office and classroom
space has operated at its 500-child per day capacity since 1998.
“When we have overflow, we have to ask kids to come back
a bit later, especially when the leagues are going on and there’s
programming in the teen center,” said Mea Johnson, who runs
the center’s program for adolescent and teenage girls.
Their desperation for space and drive to continue expanding their
programs led the community-based board of directors to launch
a capital campaign to fund a new building.
But with the fund drive stuck in first gear, the board hired Kaiser,
a youth organizer who also runs a consulting company through which
she has facilitated the capital campaigns for various buildings.
Kaiser had her work cut out for her when she took the post of
director of resource development at Bird Street, then became interim
executive director.
“Frankly, having done a lot of campaigns in the past, they
simply didn’t have the materials and resources to get a
campaign done,” she said. “I spent the first four
months of last year getting materials together. We really upgraded
the board, so there is a community component but also strong representation
from business leaders in the community and elsewhere. We went
after people O.F.D. — originally from Dorchester —
who might be living somewhere else. People in Newton, Wellesley
and other places who have a sense of community and thought the
project was worth doing.”
Kaiser says the center has raised around $1.9 million since she
took charge last year. With the $3.5 million the city had already
promised to build the gymnasium and fitness wing of the new center,
the campaign has now netted around $6 million, says Kaiser.
The center’s board and capital campaign committee hopes
to break ground next February, by which time they hope to have
raised at least 85 percent of the $11 million needed to build
the center, which would go up at 650-676 Dudley Street, on the
corner of Clifton Street.
The three-story center would contain a gym, weight room, art room,
a training kitchen, computer lab, staff offices and separate programming
rooms for each of the groups the center would serve — pre-school,
after-school child care, toddlers, seniors, pre-teens, girls program,
leadership development and teenagers.
The current Bird Street Community Center would continue to offer
programming to young children, but the teenagers and pre-teens
would move to the new building. Seniors and adults, age groups
the center does not currently serve, would be welcomed to classes
and other activities at the new center.
The original financial plan called for the center to rent the
kitchen and gymnasium to outside companies or nonprofits. Now,
under Kaiser’s leadership, the center’s directors
plan to operate the gymnasium themselves, and hire capital campaign
committee member and renowned chef Todd English to help design
the kitchen to train people to work in culinary arts.
“Running the kitchen and gym directly gives us an earned
income stream, because after you build [the center] you have to
sustain it,” said Kaiser.
Under the leadership of the community-based board, the center
has expanded exponentially in the past decade, prompting the need
for more space. In 1992, the budget was $90,000. Today, it is
$1.27 million, according to Kaiser.
In partnership with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative,
Bird Street staff conducted a community campaign to determine
whether there was a need for more youth and other programming
in the neighborhood.
They heard a resounding “yes,” and the capital campaign
was born. In Kaiser and the campaign committee, the board and
members of the Upham’s Corner community who would benefit
from more space are hoping they have found leadership that will
make their vision a reality.
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