West End Community Center closes
Andrea Medeiros
A Providence community center can't afford to stay open. The dozens of families who go there just found out about the last minute decision Thursday.
They were a paper saying by Monday the West End Community Center will be shut down for the summer.
The community center is fresh out of cash, which means 50 families in this neighborhood have nowhere to bring their kids.
“I was devastated, very devastated,” said parent Martis Alston, “It's like we need a place for our children, we have working parents and they have no idea where their children are going to go, and it's just a terrible thing.”
Alston worked at the daycare and her son went to it, so she doesn't know where her son will end up. She doesn't have a car to bring him anywhere else.
“Jobs are hard to come by and you also have to have a daycare to go out and look for these jobs,” said Alston.
She's not the only one dealing with this. A lot of families counted on the community center because it's affordable.
“We don't turn anybody away here,” said Executive Director Melissa Esposito-Devine. “We feed them breakfast. We feed them lunch. We cloth them. We get them services, whatever they need they get from us, so the community is going to be missing out on all of that.”
Plus the 15 staff members who provide those services are now out of work for at least the next two months. The non-profit has blown through it' federal funding, so it needs the city, state or someone to step in.
“I really don't want to believe that it won't re-open,” said Councilman Wilbur Jennings, “I'm pretty confident that it will, because we're going to reach out to everybody possible.”
Jennings said there's already a meeting scheduled. The plan is to get this decades old community center back open by the start of the school year.
Community center directors said they're not the only ones in this position. There are ten community centers like this one in the city. A lot of them are short on cash too. A worry for a lot of parents in the Providence.
