After 87 years serving youth, Sara Holbrook Community Center suspends programming

The Sara Holbrook Community Center will suspend services indefinitely on August 1, after 87 years serving as a steward for supporting youth in Burlington.

“SHCC is a cherished youth development organization in Burlington and this decision has not been taken lightly,” the center said in a press release Tuesday. “After a deep assessment of our financial picture, the board had no other choice but to move forward with this difficult decision.”

About 40 children in the K-5 after-school programming will be affected by the suspension, along with nearly 100 elementary and middle school kids enrolled for summer camp, according to Kristin Fontaine, the center’s board chair. The teen center, frequented by as many as 70 youth on a daily basis, will be largely unaffected, she said, as middle school programming will continue under Burlington School District.

Fontaine said the center is working with the school district and its partners at King Street Center and the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington to find alternative placements in after-school programming. She also said the Burlington mayor’s office and United Way have been instrumental in navigating the process.

“We’re all at the table,” said Shabnam Nolan, executive director of King Street Center , in an interview Wednesday. “It is going to take all of us to fix the immediate problem — that is to make sure the families and children affected are held, so no one slips through the cracks.”

Nolan called the suspension of the center’s programming “devastating” for the community, and said she hopes it highlights the importance of continuing to support the nonprofit sector.

Tanya Benosky, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington, said within a day of hearing about the suspension, she sent an email offering to take in at least 10 kids.

“We find this news so sad, both because we think Sara Holbrook has created a really special community for itself over there, and also because it is our strong belief that our kids need more support, not less,” Benosky said. “And so the closure of the city’s longest youth serving organization hits hard.”

Fontaine said the next steps for the future of the organization will be decided after they get out of the immediate “crisis phase.”

“I think the question we’re getting is like, ‘Why is this so sudden? Why did we not know about this?’” Fontaine said. “I think we were so in it of trying to keep all the parts moving that we didn’t have the luxury of, like sticking our head up to be like, ‘Whoa. What’s the bigger picture here?’”

The suspension comes just a year after the center ended its early childhood program , a decision made at the time in the hopes of helping “right the economic ship,” said Fontaine. It has been five years since community leaders gathered for a groundbreaking for the center’s $4.3 million expansion at its North Avenue location.

Fontaine said the summer specifically is a very expensive time for operations due to increased staffing levels.

Out of 10 full-time staff members, only one will stay on as a business manager. In the summer season, there are about 28 part-time staff, some of whom will be affected, but Fontaine said Burlington School District has a “variety of open positions” that may provide a “soft landing for these amazing staff.”

“I think this goes to [show] the fragility of nonprofit funding,” she said.

Fontaine said an increasingly challenging fundraising landscape is making it hard for many Burlington organizations to survive when “such a complex mix of variables” is required for a nonprofit to remain viable.

Although grants are “never a sure thing,” nonprofit organizations like Sara Holbrook have to build budgets that take grants into account, which creates a financial gap when one doesn’t come through, she said. She said the center had a gap it was unable to fill with additional fundraising, and when one piece falls out, it causes a “cascade effect.”

Expanding the organization with federal funds during the pandemic — and a rigorous capital campaign to build a new building — was successful in meeting the evolving needs of the community, but made it hard to scale back later, Fontaine said.

Fontaine said the new building was a huge investment for the community that they plan to sustain as a community resource, and are currently in the process of imagining what the space could be.

During renovations at the Integrated Arts Academy, the Holbrook center’s preschool classroom and two kindergarten classrooms will be rented out to the school district, as planned before the announcement.

The youth center was founded in 1937 by Sara Holbrook, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Vermont, following her study of settlement houses and inner-city institutions in lower Manhattan. It was first called the Burlington Community Center.

Holbrook developed childcare programs as well as outreach programs to serve the influx of immigrant families at the time. When Burlington was designated as a federal refugee settlement site in 1980, the community rose to meet growing needs, and the center’s programs evolved to accommodate them, according to a video on the center’s website .

“Vermont has a real strong history of neighbors looking after neighbors,” Leisa Pollander, the center’s former executive director, said in the video, “and I see that epitomized here every day,”

Read the story on VTDigger here: After 87 years serving youth, Sara Holbrook Community Center suspends programming .