One year of pizza parties promoting birth control.

Architectural plans for the library’s Marsden Hartley Cultural Center.

Labor for the new skate park.

Several affordable housing ventures.

More than a dozen community gardens.

Up next: dentures – eight or 10 pairs.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Agriculture picked downtown Lewiston, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Maine, to receive special federal funds for a decade. Lewiston was the smallest area in the country designated as an Enterprise Community, a recognition that things had gotten bad and needed help.

The 10 years are up on the effort called Empower Lewiston, the nonprofit created to oversee funds. The group has until the end of 2009 to spend the money it has hung onto, about $400,000.

Outside the lengthy list of grants, in some ways it’s difficult to quantify what Empower Lewiston has meant to the area. The group stopped a detailed account of its activity four years into the project, when it counted 900 new jobs in the downtown, 700 jobs retained and 50-plus community partners.

Supporters say the experiment has worked. Worked so well, in fact, that it shouldn’t end.

Members of Maine’s congressional delegation are pushing to get new funds for downtown Lewiston into President Barack Obama’s stimulus package.

“They cut across so many different projects, people and programs in the community,” said Holly Lasagna, a two-year member of Empower Lewiston’s board.

What other civic group, she asked, could step in to fund a skateboard park as part of a mission to end poverty?

“When I see people downtown, I see more pride,” said Board President Anne Lee. “I think it still has a long way to go, don’t get me wrong. (But) 10 years ago, people looked at the downtown and said, ‘Man, we’re not tearing it down fast enough.'”

About ‘a lot of things’

More than a decade ago, the city asked for a USDA designation that would bring in $4 million a year, and it had big plans for that money.

Instead, it got the promise of $250,000 a year for 10 years – and even then, not everything arrived. Empower Lewiston took in just over $2 million altogether. Blame budget cuts at the federal level.

There were early struggles and strings attached. Money couldn’t pay for construction costs. And getting locals involved on the board, and keeping them there, was tough, said Ken St. Amand, an early president.

With a long list of goals and a spate of early grants, the organization also spent time finding its way, says the current director.

“It felt like we were about a lot of things. The danger is, when you’re about a lot of things, you’re about nothing at the same time,” said Executive Director Alyson Stone.

Empower Lewiston gave $50,000 toward early engineering work on the B Street Community Center, one of the most visible downtown improvements. The center houses a pediatric dentist, a computer lab staffed by Andover College students and the group Advocates for Children, which offers play groups and a daddy boot camp.

Over the past year, more than 225 people have enrolled in Lewiston Adult Education classes and training there, said Director Eva Giles.

Empower Lewiston also played a key role in making the cultural center addition to the library a reality, said library director Rick Speer.

Other efforts were made, influencing not only the downtown and the city as a whole, but the day-to-day lives of its people. (See related vignettes.) Those efforts included:

• $41,350 to Sisters of Charity’s Lots to Gardens program;

• $116,000 to Faithworks for equipment and operations;

• $26,000 to Coastal Enterprises Inc. for home ownership assistance and the Lewiston Farmers’ Market;

• $30,000 to Skate Lewiston-Auburn Movement for the skate park.

Not everything it’s touched has blossomed. Empower Lewiston and the city have tried to add Somali-language programming to the local cable access channel – $1,500 has been set aside since 2006 – but the project has stalled for lack of participants.

And in one of the early years, then-Tri-County Health Services received $7,000 to host weekly pizza parties for teens.

Adults knew that teens were having sex, and they weren’t making the trip across the river to the group’s office on Main Street in Auburn for services, said Sara Hayes, nurse practitioner and clinical director at what is now Western Maine Community Action Health Services.

So why not bring STD testing and health information to Lewiston?

The idea: “Get them hooked on birth control,” she said.

She remembers walking through Kennedy Park, talking to teens and inviting them in.

“I can’t say that it was a raging success,” Hayes said. “Some would come; a lot didn’t.”

Future potential?

So far, Empower Lewiston has given out about $655,000 in grants and spent more than that on staff and back office operations (telephone, travel, rent), according to tax returns.

Money for staff was “part of the catalyst,” Lee said. Volunteers couldn’t be relied on to do everything.

Valarie Flanders, acting state director for the USDA, said Lewiston has met the requirements tied to its award, including regular reports and sticking to its mission “to address poverty and promote economic activity” in Census tracts 201 and 204.

“Truthfully, the role of an Enterprise Community/Empowerment Zone has really helped focus communities. Whereas (other nonprofits) may have existed and continued to plug away, it creates a common focus. It just helps direct the community, as opposed to everybody going off in a different direction,” she said.

Lasagna said projects like the skateboard park got at the “poverty of opportunity.” Whether the area has been lifted at all from financial poverty is more difficult to measure.

The city as a whole hasn’t fared well. In 1999, according to the U.S. Census, 15.5 percent of Lewiston residents lived below the poverty line. In a rolling census from 2005 to 2007, that figure had grown to 23.2 percent.

Last month, U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins joined 13 other senators in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee urging an extension on the original grant “where help is needed most.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud, D-Maine, said he’s seen its benefits.

“Through bipartisan legislation, I have been working with a coalition in Washington to not only extend the designation, but to also improve the ability of Lewiston to access all the benefits of the program,” Michaud said through a spokesperson.

One possibility, in a draft form of the economic stimulus bill late last week: $25 billion in bonds directed at recovery zones across the country in 2009 and 2010, according to Michaud’s office.

Empower Lewiston Director Stone said the group has three broad focuses left for 2009: transportation, creating a co-op food store and making a housing DVD explaining rights and courtesies. And this winter it plans a partnership with the Casey Family Foundation to offer to pay half the cost of dentures for people whose last barrier to employment or moving up on the job ladder is their teeth.

For the first time in years, Empower Lewiston has issued an open call for grant proposals with $40,000 up for grabs. Application review starts next week.

Whether, and how, the group continues depends on the outcome of federal discussions. Without more federal help, it could turn into a traditional fundraising, grant-writing nonprofit.

“We don’t want the year to pass without making the biggest bang for our USDA bucks we have remaining,” Stone said.

She’ll also spend the year working on a tally to quantify the difference Empower Lewiston has made.