The SunPost

Sharie Blanton tried. The New Orleans native and world traveler spent the last year and a half running the St. Alban's Child Enrichment Center as its executive director. But the day after Valentine’s Day is her last there, and the center’s fate is uncertain.

The nonprofit is facing an immediate financial crisis. Without a quick cash infusion, it may be forced to close, perhaps before the end of the school year. “We need $150,000 to pay the payroll on 45 employees to the end of the year,” she says. “But what we really need is an unrestricted gift of $300,000 annually to make up for the shortfall in funding elsewhere.”

The problems are many, but boil down to two things — money and demographics. The center is not bringing in enough money from grants and donations to cover its operating expenses. This has been something of a creeping issue that has worsened because St. Alban’s has been run by a volunteer board and a succession of directors trying to barely survive year to year without the resources or the outlook to develop a long-term strategy.

Will Johnson, a St. Alban’s board member for the past six years (and a leader in the Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association), says the center needs a champion willing to endow it with the funds necessary to climb out of the hole and then sustain itself.

“The school suffers from what a lot of not-for-profits suffer from,” he says. “It depends on grants where you spend the funds upfront, then get reimbursed. That can put you in a tricky place. They scrape by each month and finally it’s catching up to them.”

Blanton and others say the crisis became acute this year because the county cut its Head Start funding, and the United Way also cut its contribution in half. The St. Alban’s crew is also upset that the county gives itself more money for doing the same work (the county also runs Head Start programs), which presents a bit of a conflict of interest.

Blanton says the county gets around $9,740 per child, but expects agencies such as hers to provide the same quality of care with much less, anywhere from $5,300 to $6,700 per child.

“Yes, the county’s costs are naturally higher because of who we are,” admits Juliann Edwards, director of the county’s Community Action Agency, which disperses money to various Head Start agencies. “Our employment packages are higher.” If that’s not a good argument for the county sending all the Head Start federal funds to cheaper community agencies, rather than hoarding it to fund county pensions, then I don’t know what is.

But Edwards notes that St. Alban’s actually receives slightly more per child than it did last year, if less overall. Last year, the center was allowed funding for up to 252 children at a cost of about $6,200 each (they filled 212 slots). This year, it was granted only enough money to cover 180 children at $6,700 apiece.

“I’m not sure what’s going on with St Alban’s,” she adds. “We’ve been trying to work with them as much as we can. We want to make sure the program does well.”

The second existential crisis for St. Alban’s is that there are fewer poor children coming to it as the neighborhood around it gentrifies. The center has been a community fixture for thousands of poor children and their parents since its founding in 1949 by legendary Coconut Grove activist Elizabeth Virrick and prominent members of the Christ Episcopal Church. In those days, the segregated neighborhood was known as the Coconut Grove Negro District. It has since been variously called the Black Grove, the West Grove and Village West.

During segregation, and in the heady civil rights era that followed, St. Alban’s was one of a handful of institutions built by the sweat and shallow purses of the community. Its purpose was to provide early education services and nutrition to poor children, and day care services for working parents.

Over the years, it expanded its services and even its service area to include day care in South Miami and Little Havana. It became a provider of the Head Start program and attracted grants and donations from the United Way and many other philanthropic institutions. Some 15,000 children passed through its doors, including many who became noteworthy members of the community and beyond (including an astronaut, several NFL players, pastors, teachers, bureaucrats and businessmen).

But, like many institutions in Village West, St. Alban’s has suffered the civic decline of the neighborhood in the past couple of decades. Old leaders have mostly died or moved on; new ones with the will to sustain the daily fight are rarer than an endangered species in a Kendall subdivision. The success stories tend to leave the area or get their philanthropic kicks by buying fancy cars for their church leaders.

Also, the neighborhood’s demographics are rapidly changing. The real estate boom got various developers interested in making something of Village West. Many old-time families with homes and roots sold them during the frenzy. A huge swath of Grand Avenue was purchased to build new condos, apartments and retail. That has yet to happen, and I’m told some community members are talking to the developers about including affordable housing in the mix, but it’s clear that the area’s demographics will be much different a few years from now.

St. Alban’s is caught in the tidal shift without a way to make it to shore. Its historic mission to serve the poor is slowly disappearing, while new middle-class families that will also need day care services haven’t yet filled in the gap.

“Coconut Grove is changing,” says Bill Quesenberry, the St. Alban’s board secretary. “There are fewer poor people, fewer children. In the long run, as the complexion of the Grove changes, there’s going to be more people and more children. Probably not all poor children, but they will all need schools. If we could keep going for a couple years, we could fill that need and balance it out.”

Clement Jack has 5-year-old twins at the center, a boy and a girl, each with learning disabilities. He’s disabled himself, but contributes by working for free around the school. He feels that the community isn’t sufficiently riled up about the threat to the center’s future.

“Where will the children go if they close that school?” he asks. “I tell [parents] to call the mayor, the commissioners. There’s lots of money out there, but they waste it on all kinds of things. If you want to run all the blacks out of Coconut Grove, fine, but don’t take the future of the children. And the churches have money, but they’re not helping people, they preaching for themselves.”

In the meantime, there is a real need today for hundreds of parents and their children. Angela Council works while her 3-year-old daughter attends the Head Start program at St. Alban’s. Two older daughters attend schools in the Grove. “I grew up in the Grove,” she says. “A lot of kids and their parents and grandparents went there. If it closes, a lot of parents and kids are gonna suffer.”

Sharie Blanton, eyeing the shrinking budget, opted to find another job in hopes that her salary could give St. Alban’s at least some money to work with. But right up until she leaves on Friday, she’s frantically meeting with institutions and businesses to try to secure at least the short-term funding needed to keep the center in business.

She knows there are lots of people with money in Miami. The trick is getting them to connect to a community resource such as St. Alban's. “I read in the paper that the Miami Heat paid Shaq more than $450,000 a game,” she says. “What we could do with just some of that is incredible.”

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