LEWISTON – A popular Portland-area youth ministry hopes to expand into Lewiston in 2005, opening a youth and child center on Birch Street.

Area churches need to raise as much as $800,000 to make that happen, according to Dale Carlson, executive director of The Root Cellar.

“This really has to be an effort the community owns,” Carlson said. “We don’t have big money we’re bringing with us. We’re relying entirely on the area churches. If they want this to happen, they need to go out and make it happen.”

The Root Cellar operates a 17,000-square-foot community center in the Munjoy Hill area of Portland. It opened in 1984, offering teen and after-school programs. Since then, it has grown to include food distribution, English as a second language classes, community dentistry and counseling.

This is the first expansion the ministry has considered since it began, Carlson said.

“We know what to do once we get there,” Carlson said. “First, we need to learn how to get there. We’re just getting started on that.”

The group hopes to buy the building at 89 Birch St. in March and open its doors by the fall of 2005.

“It’s an old cement block warehouse-type building, with about 6,000 square feet of space, total,” Carlson said. “It’s wide open, so that makes the renovation a bit easier and lets us do what we want.”

The building is near the corner of Birch and Bartlett streets and within walking distance of Lewiston High and Longley Elementary schools.

“The location is one of the exciting things about this,” he said. “It’s right on the path many of the kids take home from school.”

The Rev. Jerry Begin, pastor of the Spirit of Fire Evangelical Ministries in Lewiston, agreed. He and other area pastors have pledged their support for the center and are hoping to raise the money needed for renovations.

“Putting it right in the neighborhood, right by the schools where kids walk right by it, is very important,” Begin said. “A lot of these after-school programs, the kids can’t go because they can’t get there. But this will be right there, offering a really good atmosphere.”

Begin is president of the Evangelical Pastors Prayer Fellowship, a group of about 38 church leaders from Lewiston to Oxford. He expects area pastors to start talking about the project from their pulpits in the next few months.

“If I had $800,000, I’d build it myself,” Begin said. “But that would be the wrong thing to do, in a sense. The community really needs it, and they have to do the work.”

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The ministry would offer teen and after-school programs, English as a second language classes, community dentistry and counseling at 89 Birch St. in Lewiston.