Empower Lewiston is changing its course to help children and teenagers who live
in the downtown area.
LEWISTON – An agency that has helped some of Maine’s poorest people find better homes and jobs intends to soon go to work for kids.
Empower Lewiston has spent the past four years spending more than half a million dollars in the city’s two poorest neighborhoods and giving grants to nonprofit agencies that clean up blight, perform career counseling and build houses.
Now, its 18-member board hopes to focus more on children and teens and become more active in the money it spends, rather than merely funneling cash. Meanwhile, the group has nearly half a million in unallocated money waiting to be spent.
“We were basically that funnel,” said Barbara Rankins, the group’s neighborhood coordinator and former president. “Now, we’re trying to be much more collaborative.”
Rankins said she did not know how the changes would affect agencies that have received money from Empower Lewiston in the past.
They hope to help more youths, though, teens in particular. Rankins said adults and small children are served by scores of public agencies, many of which already have some affiliation with Empower Lewiston. Older kids are often left out.
“We’re moving toward making the youth our focus,” Rankins said. There were no definite plans yet for refocusing the group’s resources.
The board hopes some of that will come from local residents, the people Empower Lewiston was charged to help.
On Monday, the group is holding its annual meeting with the public at the new B Street Community Center, a building that opened just a few weeks ago with the group’s help.
“I hope we have so many people that we run out of chairs,” said Rankins, who wants people to come prepared. “Have an opinion and don’t be afraid to express it.” The board will listen, she vowed.
Trial, error
Since its creation in 1998 and its first federal check in 2000, Empower Lewiston has undergone criticism that its money was being unwisely spent.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the group was created to help people in two census tracts, an hourglass-shaped area that included the Little Canada neighborhood and the homes between Walnut and Lisbon streets.
It’s one of the poorest places in Maine.
Empower Lewiston has funded more than 40 projects with dozens of area agencies since the money began arriving.
The projects included buying new equipment for Faithworks, a nonprofit group that puts often-unemployable people to work on piecework projects, and money toward the purchase and rehabilitation of apartments.
Empower Lewiston money often was added to projects such as building low-income homes, establishing a new community center and planting trees and flowers in empty lots.
It has also been used to fund pizza clinics, in which young people attended meetings about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and related matters. Empower Lewiston also funded the publication of a community resource guide in which workers collected details on hundreds of places to go for help, from local food pantries to places to receive free job counseling.
So far, the group has received just over $1 million. There’s another $1.5 million to come.
“We’ve trialed and errored,” said Rankins, who began working with the group by 1999. “I wish we had been more focused, early on. I do feel good about what we’ve done. I feel better about where we’re going.”
She and the board members will make a lot of decisions this year.
One of them will be what to do for a staff. In April, Executive Director Carol Ansheles resigned. Ansheles was the group’s grant writer.
Ansheles’ salary and benefits and other administrative costs were expensive, more than $300,000 in the organization’s first four years.
The Empower Lewiston board has yet to decide if it wants to refill Ansheles position. It may contract with other groups to write grants and ensure that the necessary paperwork is completed, Rankins said.
The group is even considering starting a company of its own, something that could make it sustainable beyond the life span of its $2.5 million federal promise. But such discussions are purely hypothetical.
“We’re more mindful now that we’re halfway through,” Rankins said. “We’re going to try and stick around.”
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