SOUTH SIDE CENTER SOUGHT

Organizers are shopping for a place for a community center to serve families on Cape Girardeau's South Side.

The Family Resource Center Inc. wants to create a "one-stop shop" of government, recreation and education services for children and adults in South Cape Girardeau, said Edythe Davis, vice president of the group's board of directors.

"We're trying to put together a facility, and I'm using that word in the very broadest sense; that's going to be like a community center in the southeast quadrant of town," Davis said. "We want a facility that will house different agencies that people in that area need."

The organization, now a not-for-profit corporation, grew out of an effort by the Community Caring Council to consolidate services for families, said Shirley Ramsey, executive director of the Community Caring Council.

At the heart of the effort is the lack of transportation available for families without cars, Davis said. If services were consolidated in the neighborhoods where they are needed, the transportation problem is solved.

Davis said organizers want the facility to house after-school education programs for children and GED and job training programs for adults.

"Then we want to add recreation programs and things like that that will help keep these young people off the streets," she said.

A place where youngsters could play basketball or baseball would be a great addition, Davis said.

In addition, Davis said, agencies like the Division of Family Services or Division of Aging could send staff to the facility for a day or half-day to work with families in the area who need their services.

"We don't intend to set up a facility and do all the things ourselves," she said.

She said the Cape Girardeau Public Library and the police department have already expressed interest in setting up satellite programs at the center, and the county health department is also interested.

Davis said organizers want to make the facility "a real community center where we provide services and try to help the people who live in the area meet their needs."

But first they have to find a building. "There just aren't very many places down in that part of town," Davis said.

Organizers have looked at the old St. Francis Hospital building at Pacific and Good Hope. "We would like very much to rehab the old St. Francis, and we are working on that in every way we can," she said. No concrete plans have been made, said Davis.

The board has also considered the possibility of the May Green School building, scheduled for closing, but again, no concrete plans have been made.

Board members are continuing to look for locations and to garner support for the center, Davis said.

"We have just defined the kind of program that we want to go in there, so when we talk to people we can give them some realistic idea of what we want to do," she said.

Board members have visited several family resource centers in Chicago and St. Louis, as well as the Epworth Center in East Prairie "to make sure that what we need to do will be available," Davis said.

"Most of the time resource centers are information sites, and this will certainly be that," she said. "We want it to be human-related by not having to tell people they need to go here or go there. And we want people to be able to walk to it."

The facility could include some more basic services, such as a public telephones available for residents' use, she said.

Davis said organizers plan to have some services available to residents "sometime in 1998," with a full-blown program in place within the year-and-a-half following that.

"Right now our top priority is to simply find a place that we can even get started in, even if it's going to be too small," she said.

The board is starting to look at funding-raising possibilities, Davis said, including what types of grants might be available.