Community Caring Council dedicates offices to Mary Kasten

The latest honor bestowed on former state representative Mary Kasten seemed to mean a little more than some of the others.

It was, in fact, worth a whole suitcase of honors. Kasten, who represented Cape Girardeau in the Missouri House from 1977 to 1995, brought along a travel bag full of awards recognizing her part in establishing the Community Caring Council when the agency's office was dedicated to her and her late husband, Melvin Kasten.

"These plaques and memorials have been given to me, but they have really been given for the council," Kasten said during a brief ceremony naming the council's offices the Kasten Community Development Center.

The council's new offices, at 937 Broadway in the Broadway Plaza building, will house executive offices and conference rooms for planning strategy. The council, begun with Kasten and a few others in 1989, is an effort to help people in need with a coordinated effort, Kasten said.

"Very soon, everybody in the community seemed to know it was the right thing to do," she said. "When you are doing the right things for the right reasons, it usually comes out right."

The effort not only has a strong base in Cape Girardeau, but the idea has spread statewide. Fostered through the Missouri Department of Social Services, the caring communities program set six core results to measure success.

Those areas include efforts to help parents find work, keep children and families safe and healthy, make young children ready to enter school and prepare youths to enter the work force and be productive citizens.

The council was born, Kasten said, while she was a lawmaker when a woman with five children called for help. "I called a lot of agencies, and none knew what the other was doing," she said. "I knew there were a lot of good ways to help people, but none were communicating with each other."

The council develops the community assessment, which is how residents inform the various agencies allied through the council what they want for the community. Those assessments have consistently put the need for public transportation at the top of the list. Efforts to improve transit have resulted in the expansion of the Cape County Transit Authority into the Cape Girardeau city limits.

"Transportation is a perfect example" of the council's efforts, said Kay Azuma, community coordinator for the council. "It was such a long time coming together."

The key to the council's success, Azuma said, is to keep the lines of communication open between a myriad of agencies. "It is all about establishing relationships with one another," she said.

rkeller@semissourian.com

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