Twenty years ago, Rev. Clayton Lewis, former pastor of
Eventually, the
Both our neighborhood and the center have changed significantly in the past two decades. The center, now an independent non-profit organization, still services area families in need. But its goal is to do so by helping patrons move out of poverty and into long-term self-sufficiency.
“We started primarily helping with hunger,” says Carreen Carson, director of administration and development for the center. “But our focus has now changed more to meeting basic needs of people in trouble and helping them make long-term improvements in their lives.”
Still, the center’s food pantry is its most widely used program. Almost 18,000 people per year get food from the pantry on a monthly basis.
The center also offers an employment program, assisting with job leads and job training for about 2,000 people per year. But
“Now when we get people jobs, the contact stops,” she says. “So many times, they wouldn’t stay. They’d get their first paycheck and have more money than they’d ever had before, and they’d quit. We’d see the same people again a few weeks later, still living day to day.”
With the new program,
“We’ll have fewer people in the new program, but we expect it to be much more effective long-term,” she says.
“We have SMU students tutor them, take field trips, offer art classes along with drama and music,”
The center has 30 kids in the program, attending every day after school and all day during the summer.
“It’s really incredible to see the effect we can have on them,”
“When you take a kid from making Cs to As, and get them seriously thinking about going to college for the first time, it’s really amazing. One of our girls told us she’d never be able to go to college. She just never saw herself doing that. Now she’s preparing to take her SATs. I start to cry every time I talk about that.”