Change comes on fast at Phillis Wheatley

By Anna B. Mitchell  

AUGUST 24, 2010 9:20 a.m. (0)

Since taking over the financially struggling Phillis Wheatley Center three years ago, Donna Coleman said, the smiles and hugs she gets when she leaves her office keep her going.

The Center served 308 children and youth last year and has hundreds of young people on waiting lists.

“I see the opportunities for them, and I know unless education becomes a real core value that we can keep tearing down and rebuilding till the cows come home, and it won’t make a difference,” she said.

Despite measurable academic and behavioral improvements of those participating in the Center’s programs year-round, financial instability could spell the end of its biggest and oldest program – after-school care. Over the past 10 years, several leadership changes, vacillating state funding, declines in donations and cost overruns have drained the Center’s reserves.

Money is ready for the Center’s other programs – workforce development and repertory theatre – but Coleman estimates she will need about $100,000 before school starts in a few weeks to keep care in place for more than 100 elementary- and middle-school children. Almost 90 percent of families served have an unemployed parent (compared to 10 percent three years ago) and pay a fraction of the true cost to staff and equip the program.

The Center’s board members are pinning much of their hopes on a 7:30 p.m. benefit concert July 31 at the Peace Center – “A Night of Stars and Dreams.” Meanwhile, they’ve formed a fund-raising committee, Friends of Phillis Wheatley, meeting weekly this month to find a solution.

“We want to keep Phillis Wheatley, we want to keep it going because it’s part of our history,” said Margaret McJunkin, who grew up in Nicholtown. “We’ve lost a lot of our schools that were in our areas. This is just … our buildings, our associations and things are dwindling away.”

The Phillis Wheatley Association, named 91 years ago in honor of the nation’s first African American poet, has redefined its role in the Greenville community several times since first teaching the arts, social graces and extra academics to black children barred at the time from public libraries and parks.

Its buildings on East McBee Avenue and then on East Broad became a social hub before integration – hosting dances for black teens and young adults (some of them recruits from Donaldson Air Force Base) through the 1950s and 1960s.

By the 1970s, it expanded social services under the leadership of John McCarroll, especially with its relocation next to a public housing project (Jesse Jackson Townhomes).

“John McCarroll, he had the skill where you may not have any money in your pocket but when he got through talking to you, you had to give something,” said Sen. Ralph Anderson, a former Phillis Wheatley board member and advocate in the Legislature. “He was gifted, and his vision was to keep adding on and adding on.”

McCarroll retired in 2000 and died seven years later. His wife, Rosaphine, said she believed part of his sickness, a weak heart, was due to seeing the Center in decline.

“I think it hurt him,” she said.

Some of Greenville’s most successful black leaders in business and politics came through Phillis Wheatley, including State Rep. Chandra Dillard, Anderson and Brent Clinkscale, a partner with Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice.

But with Jesse Jackson Townhomes now gone and money for nonprofits ever more competitive, Coleman said the Center’s leaders decided three years ago to scale back and refocus the Center’s core mission for children.

Alcohol has been banned from parties at the Center; only groups serving children are allowed to host meetings there; and any group wanting to use the Center at night has to pay going market rates.

In 2006, before restricting use of the building, the Center collected $6,000 in rentals.

“That wasn’t enough to pay for the janitor’s overtime,” said Coleman, a Greenville native trained in banking and law. She spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., consulting for public housing, diversity initiatives and the Washington Math, Science and Technology Charter School.

Despite these improvements, cash flow in 2009 at about $700,000 was half what it was a decade earlier when McCarroll’s 31-year leadership came to an end.

State programs that once paid for after-school programs and other social services have largely dried up, donations are down and the United Way – citing financial instability – announced this past spring it would no longer provide $150,000 annually.

United Way board chair Margaret Clark said the decision was never about the program’s quality – which she said was high. Phillis Wheatley’s outlook was too unstable to justify funding, she said, but the United Way did offer a one-time emergency allocation of $80,000 to the Center’s repertory theatre in late June.

Tax records show the center covered its $1.2 million budget in 2006 in part by selling a $400,000 piece of property. Decreased costs and an influx of more grant money the following year put the center back in the black. But 2008 was disastrous. Donations and grants fell to $490,000, down from $942,000 the year before, and the center spent more than $400,000 – nearly all its cash reserve – to cover programs.

“Phillis Wheatley has been struggling like most nonprofit agencies for a while,” said Dillard, also a board member. “But for some, when they catch a cold, it becomes the flu. That’s what we have here.”

Financial records were not available for 2009, but Coleman described the Center as

“land rich” with “no cash” earlier this month.

The cost of five full-time staff and the part-timers who run summer and after-school programs eats up most of the center’s budget; then there are the utilities and other building costs that run in excess of $100,000. Feeding and providing recreation to the kids costs another $30,000 or so.

Dwight Woods, director of the repertory theatre, said their programs reach kids who don’t have any other outlet. One young lady with a cognitive disability has made friends with girls her age and learned to recite lines.

“Three years ago, we couldn’t get her to speak,” Woods said. “She couldn’t remember how to say, ‘Good evening.’”

Coleman said she almost cries when she takes the stage.

“For me that spells impact,” Coleman said. “In other circles, that’s ‘just stories.’”

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