Sweltering in summer, layering up in winter, wading — indoors — after a big rain. That’s what Margaret Brown and other J.L. King Center staff and volunteers in Starkville sometimes contend with when they report to the center on North Long Street to wage an offensive. Theirs is a campaign against poverty, underachievement and hopelessness. They are producing results with adults and children, but the former field house they work in needs TLC so that the powerful programs that take place there — after-school tutoring, Work Keys testing, GED study and testing, Workforce Development, job fairs and more — can continue.
An innovative partnership between Starkville Utilities, TVA and The Homestead Education Center in Starkville plans to transform the outdated structure plagued by dollar-draining energy inefficiency into a model of how an energy-saving strategy can impact use and bottom line.
“The J.L. King Center is doing an effective job of moving people out of poverty, but they are literally heating and cooling the outdoors,” said Alison Buehler, co-founder and director of The Homestead Center. “J.L. King’s current leadership team has lowered the monthly utility bill from $900 a month to around $450. They are very aware that every dollar that goes to energy is taken from programming.”
Savings realized by energy use improvements will go directly toward the funding-strapped Youth Development After School Program that ensures every student’s homework is completed and checked each day — and that every child has received a hot meal.
Buehler said, “Starkville Utilities and TVA are putting $8,000 toward making the building more efficient. … While $8,000 is great, we want to match it.”
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Raising that match is the focus of The Homestead’s Helping Hands Project this month. Each November for the past four years, Buehler has reached out to Homestead members and the wider public to contribute toward an identified local need. Past projects have repaired a family’s home, put 200 bikes and 1,000 books into the community, helped a teen go to college and put a roof on the King community center.
The Homestead, which offers workshops, retreats and events on health, wellness, natural living and strengthening community, has been a partner of the J.L. King Center and its mission since 2016. The after-school program began about a year ago.
“We have seen people come in the doors of the center as broken people and seen them walk out a year later with degrees, jobs, homes and effective parenting skills,” Buehler shared. “This is how you end generational poverty.”
While funding for morning workforce programs for individuals ages 17-24 is in place, the after-school program currently serving about 45 kids daily is severely under-funded due to loss of grant funding.
“It succeeds because the women who run the program are not getting paid,” said Buehler. “They volunteer to do it because they believe in the kids.”
Their goal is to get every child passing all academic subjects.
Margaret Brown “pushes and preaches” the center’s “roads to prosperity” message to the children she interacts with daily. The child development staff member and nutritionist helps identify each student’s academic weaknesses that merit extra attention — mainly math, language and reading, she said. Providing a learning environment with reliable heating, cooling and lighting will have a positive impact on progress.
“We do what we can summer and winter to keep the bill down,” Brown explained. “In summer, we shut the lights off and kept the air as high as we could take it. We got a lot of fans to help.”
Brown also spoke of water that sometimes comes in under old doors after a heavy rain, and of numerous spots where heat or air conditioning escapes the building.
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Starkville Utilities General Manager Terry Kemp is enthusiastic about the partnership with TVA and The Homestead Center.
“We saw this as an opportunity to actually provide an example of how energy efficiency and new technology could be incorporated into basically older buildings that would be used for different functions going forward,” he said.
Buehler remarked, “They will use the site as a teaching space to show small businesses how to best impact energy and dollar savings, using the King Center as a model.”
Kemp expects most upgrades to involve heating, cooling, lighting and possibly kitchen efficiency and water heating.
“Those are probably the top areas we’re looking at. Lighting, for example, has improved tremendously since that building was constructed,” he said. “We’re in the process of doing a detailed energy audit of the building to realize where the best value for investment would rise.”
Licensed general contractor Kim Moreland of Starkville is integral to that process. She is donating labor for specific improvements such as a dropped ceiling, energy-efficient windows and doors and improved air handling.
“This is a project that I fully believe in,” she said. “Before we got on board, I went over there and met with some of the ladies and saw what they were doing. Our community needs it, the town needs it.”
Brown said, “Once they get it done, I’m going to be proud that my students on all sides of this building, in every classroom, can really enjoy this and that this will be a place they can be comfortable and get the information and learning they need.”
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November, Buehler said, is her favorite month because of the annual Helping Hands project.
“It’s the month when this community gathers its collective concern for our wider community and makes a difference,” she said. Toward this year’s goal of sustainable energy and youth development, a donation as small as $10 can change a light bulb at the J.L. King Center. A $50 gift could purchase a panel of drop ceiling; $100 can replace an old window. A $1,000 contribution could help install a mini split HVAC unit. Each improvement will help reduce utility costs, freeing dollars to “re-energize” the after-school program.
For more information, visit thehomesteadcenter.org/helping-hands-2019 or email Buehler at [email protected].
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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