A neighborhood empowered

A Neighborhood Empowered

By Metro Santa Cruz.com
01.21.09

Last month, when residents in Beach Flats heard the city was looking to cut funding to the Beach Flats Community Center, it seemed only natural that they would organize a march involving more than 200 people to cram City Hall with supporters and demand that the center be saved. But there’s a big difference between demanding action and finding solutions.

That community proved it could do both last week with the announcement that the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center, the Boys & Girls Club, Bridges to Kinder preschool program and several other organizations would be stepping up to keep the center doing what it does best: supporting families.

With a final contract still in the works, the BFCC will no longer be a city entity but rather part of the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center, a privately owned nonprofit organization. While BFCC may lose some of the surefire media attention afforded to tax-supported programs, it will gain several nonprofit veteran workers to run the books and coveted 501(c)(3) tax status.

“This center is really weaved into the fabric of the community,” says BFCC community liaison Reyna Ruiz. “And the community really stepped up and showed that they value what we do and believe we need to keep going.”

Along with the Surfing Museum, Museum of Natural History, Harvey West Pool and Teen Center, the Beach Flats Community Center looked to be doomed with Santa Cruz $7 million in the red. But at the Jan. 13 City Council meeting, Dannette Shoemaker, director of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, announced all five community centers would be spared for at least six more months, thanks mostly to private citizens and nonprofits.

For a family who walks through the BFCC doors over the next six months, it will be like nothing has changed. The same staff members who have made the center a success over its 15-year lifetime will still be behind the front desk. That’s exactly what Jenn O’Brien-Rojo, Resource Development director at WAWC, says she was aiming for when her organization stepped up to permanently absorb and keep it afloat.

“When I found out that the center might be closed, it sent me into kind of a panic,” she says. “We have always shared a lot of families [with the BFCC], and all I could think was that that center has to be there.”

It will be through the efforts of nine organizations like the Sunrise Rotary, Familia Center, Mercy Housing and Community Bridges that the BFCC will keep operating. The WAWC will handle payroll, human resources and administrative support, while the Bridges to Kinder preschool program will be in charge of raising money to pay the center’s few employees. The Boys & Girls Club will support a 15-hour-per-week position to run the center’s after-school program.

Beach Flats residents are no strangers to challenges or to overcoming them. Last March, when told there was no money to keep the center’s 2-acre community garden open, it only took one rowdy meeting to round up the needed volunteers to keep it going.

But while the next six months may be paved for the BFCC, a more long-term financial support structure is needed. Ruiz says the center needs to come up with $122,000 this fiscal year and each year after.

“We’re still fundraising in crisis mode,” she says. “We are very thankful for the support we’ve received. They’ve given us hope and time to think. But we’re not completely saved yet.”