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Benefit to help community center

Center Street YMCA hopes to raise $30,000-$35,000 essential for youth programs.

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 9:39 PM Monday, November 9, 2009

“By 1914, the (Center Street) YMCA was weakened to the point of exhaustion by a desperate struggle for existence.”

— YMCA history

SPRINGFIELD — From one point of view, the history of the Center Street YMCA, now the Springfield Urban League and Community Center, has been one of financial struggle and, in recent years, controversy.

From another, it has been the story of African-Americans who have never given up on their goal of providing opportunities and programs for the youth of the community.

“An Evening of Song” scheduled for 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14, in the Family Center of St. John Missionary Baptist Church is an effort to continue the latter tradition.

The event will feature the 40-voice Center City Chorale of singers from area churches, fiddler Tyler Detrick and Anna Clara Gee Balckwell performing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Tickets are $15.

Ken Stone, chairman of the Community Center’s board of directors, said the after-school and weekend programs the center hopes to provide are “really needed.”

“We’re trying to keep kids off the streets.”

For the past four years, the center has been home to youth programs funded by a grant that has expired.

Using an all-volunteer staff, Stone said the hope is to raise the $30,000 to $35,000 needed to keep the doors open.

Goals include:

• An after-school program with a study table and instruction for passing state proficiency tests.

• A weekend basketball league, perhaps run by the organization that supports the Wildcats youth football team.

In addition, “there seem to be a lot of Latino people moving into the area, and we’d like to serve them, too,” Stone said.

He said the facility “has been a great institution for the community.”

As a child, “I learned how to swim there,” Stone said, with the late Lymon Alexander as his coach.

With the current building marking its 60th anniversary, he said, “We’d like to return it to what it was like when I was a kid.”

Lot to be sold for taxes

A lot that the Springfield Urban League and Community Center owns at 319 E. Euclid Ave. will be auctioned off at a sheriff’s sale Nov. 20 to pay off $2,633 in back taxes.

The notice of the sale was filed Wednesday, Nov. 4, with the Clerk of Clark County Common Pleas Court.

Ken Stone, president of the center’s board, said the parcel is one of a handful the center owns around the city but that a previous board did not declare tax-exempt.

Taxes have been accumulating on the properties.

“We’re working on that to get it straightened around” as one of the problems that started under a previous administration, Stone said. He said the current board has been “making real progress” in moving forward.

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