Worcester Youth Center
The Worcester Youth Center is one of the city’s hidden gems, where hundreds of the city’s youth enjoy after school programs, GED completion courses, community events, music programs, after school tutoring, and competitive sports and dance teams. Although the Center is packed on a daily basis with young people seeking to take advantage of such programs, it is unfortunately lacking in up-to-date facilities to support them. After many meetings with the center’s executive director, the staff, and the teens that make the center their home, we have drawn up renovation plans to further the center’s most popular dance and recreation programs.
The Dance Studio: The room that the center currently uses is nothing more than a large empty space with a cement floor, despite the fact that the center sponsors and trains a girls’ dance team and offers a variety of after-school dance programs. The cement floor, in particular, is very limiting and possibly harmful to dancers’ knees. We are planning to send 15 student volunteers to the site, to work together with 15 youth members of the Center, to lay a new, professional-quality hardwood dance studio floor, in partnership with students from the carpentry department of the Worcester Technical High School. In addition, we will set up a surround-sound corner-mounted speaker system with doc for compact disk and iPod plugin, repaint the walls and hang mirrors around the perimeter, mount a ballet stretching bar on the west side of the room, and finish it off with large cursive stickers scattered above the mirrors displaying the word “Dance” in all different languages.
The Rec Room: The center also has a very large, garage-like, recreation room where they host functions and hold popular movie nights. The space is in need of proper technology and seating to support the volume of kids who participate in these community functions. We plan to convert the eastern half of the recreation room into more of a lounge with a defined game-room type space and a multimedia space, installing a foosball table, a ping-pong table, a big-screen television, a DVD player, video games, new couches, and bean bag chairs.
Looking to the future: Worcester college student-groups are ecstatic about the potential that the dance studio renovation would offer them. In particular the Holy Cross organization Student Projects for Urban Development has already begun advertising and designing partnerships between the Holy Cross dance and aerobics groups to implement new student-led exercise programs. The executive director of the Youth Center is also very excited about the potential of the Holy Cross female hip-hop dance group partnering with the Youth Center’s dance team. The cultivation of self-esteem and positive role-model relationships between the young women of Holy Cross and the girls of Worcester are just some of the wonderful developments that could come from such revitalized Youth Center programs.
The Dance Studio: The room that the center currently uses is nothing more than a large empty space with a cement floor, despite the fact that the center sponsors and trains a girls’ dance team and offers a variety of after-school dance programs. The cement floor, in particular, is very limiting and possibly harmful to dancers’ knees. We are planning to send 15 student volunteers to the site, to work together with 15 youth members of the Center, to lay a new, professional-quality hardwood dance studio floor, in partnership with students from the carpentry department of the Worcester Technical High School. In addition, we will set up a surround-sound corner-mounted speaker system with doc for compact disk and iPod plugin, repaint the walls and hang mirrors around the perimeter, mount a ballet stretching bar on the west side of the room, and finish it off with large cursive stickers scattered above the mirrors displaying the word “Dance” in all different languages.
The Rec Room: The center also has a very large, garage-like, recreation room where they host functions and hold popular movie nights. The space is in need of proper technology and seating to support the volume of kids who participate in these community functions. We plan to convert the eastern half of the recreation room into more of a lounge with a defined game-room type space and a multimedia space, installing a foosball table, a ping-pong table, a big-screen television, a DVD player, video games, new couches, and bean bag chairs.
Looking to the future: Worcester college student-groups are ecstatic about the potential that the dance studio renovation would offer them. In particular the Holy Cross organization Student Projects for Urban Development has already begun advertising and designing partnerships between the Holy Cross dance and aerobics groups to implement new student-led exercise programs. The executive director of the Youth Center is also very excited about the potential of the Holy Cross female hip-hop dance group partnering with the Youth Center’s dance team. The cultivation of self-esteem and positive role-model relationships between the young women of Holy Cross and the girls of Worcester are just some of the wonderful developments that could come from such revitalized Youth Center programs.
Cookson Park
Cookson Park was founded in 1936 and is named after the late Worcester mayor Walter Cookson. The park features a baseball field, woodland paths, benches, a picnic area, a swingset, and a sandbox. This spring the College of the Holy Cross is donating a brand new playground. Working for Worcester is supplying 30 student volunteers to tear down the old structures and excavate the land in preparation for the new structure. In addition, 20 volunteers will be painting and landscaping the baseball field to give the park's primary recreation spaces a much needed facelift. This park is used by the city's hikers, little league teams, children, and families and Working for Worcester is proud to contribute to its enhancement this spring.
