![]() ![]() ![]() She has attracted older youth by holding themed dances, like Hawaiian luaus, and letting high school clubs co-sponsor dances to raise money. Taylor found the same challenge at the House of Rock in Kentucky. Seniors, she says, are the hardest to attract. Breniser says she typically sees around 25 kids in an afternoon, ranging from seventh-graders to high school juniors. The facility features basketball, table tennis, movies and special programs on such things as Tai Kwon Do and salsa dancing. “Some kids won’t come here, because it’s a church,” she says. Kelly Breniser, who serves as a youth adviser for the Hartland United Methodist Church on the outskirts of Detroit, says that after she finally convinced parishioners to use part of the church’s new fellowship hall as an after-school hangout for teens, she had trouble convincing kids to go there. Jones, who helped organize Waverly’s Phoenix Kids Café in 2003, says downtown businesses rallied around the project because they realized that if kids had their own hangout, they wouldn’t be milling around in front of the stores so much.īut even after winning community support and money, organizers still have to lure the teens and keep them coming. “Eventually, people recognized this would be a concentrated place for them to go.” “The kids were hanging out downtown anyway,” Jones says. Jennifer Jones, nutrition program manager for the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tioga County in New York, ran into those concerns while lobbying for a teen hangout in the small town of Waverly. Almost all supporters of teen centers run into community opposition based on fears about teens gathering in a concentrated place, causing trouble and making neighborhoods undesirable or unsafe. The Neutral Zone, like many teen centers, receives some money from local government, but relies heavily on less reliable revenue streams, such as grants and private donations.Īnother issue is location. The foundation’s youth council provided partial funding for a teen hangout called The Neutral Zone in 1998, and while the hangout has been wildly successful among the area’s youth, Bloom admits that money is often hard to come by. ![]() “Funding is a constant challenge,” says Martha Bloom, vice president of programs for the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation in Michigan. While the idea of creating teen centers so kids can have a safe place to go after school or on weekends is common, actually opening one and keeping it going is unusual. While the House of Rock, which opened last January, quickly became a popular youth hangout, the road to get there wasn’t easy – particularly when the Taylors asked for financial support from Harrison County, and some officials balked at funding a private enterprise with taxpayers’ money. So she and her husband proposed to turn part of their fitness center into a place for teens to socialize, dance and have a good time in a safe environment. Suzanne Taylor, who co-owns the Rock Fitness Center in Cynthiana, Ky., a small town 30 miles north of Lexington, heard the refrain from her own teenager. While teenagers in towns and cities across American routinely lament, “There’s nothing to do here,” creating a teen hangout is a difficult task. So you’re going to create a safe teen center in your town, and teens are actually going to hang out there? Yeah, right. ![]()
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