Belle Center perseveres despite neighborhood turmoil
Overcoming adversity, programs help youth to seek high goals
Jaleel Younger, a freshman at Hutchinson-Central Technical High School, goes to the Father Belle Community Center on a daily basis.
The 14-year-old started doing that nearly three years ago, volunteering to help teach 9-and 10-year-olds at a summer camp.
He liked it so much, and saw himself as being able to work well with children, that he began helping with an after-school program.
“It’s cool to be around positive influences,” Younger said.
For Younger, and many other young people, the Belle Center at Maryland Street and Busti Avenue is helping them set their sights high.
Younger feels safe here, close to his home on the near West Side, despite what some of those looking in from the outside may think.
For the Belle Center, a fatal September shooting a stone’s throw from its doors wasn’t the first time — or the last — it faced adversity.
Three days after 19-year-old Omar Fraticelli-Lugo was killed Sept. 15, Carlos Minguela, a 19-year-old from the Town of Tonawanda, was shot in the foot and hand by a group of youths on bicycles right in front of the center.
There also was the time about a year ago when vandals broke into vans parked outside the building overnight. The thieves stole the vehicles’ inspection stickers.
In April, vandals hit the center, breaking windows and toys, as well as scribbling graffiti on the building.
But Nestor Hernandez, the center’s executive director, has experience in dealing with tough times.
Hernandez, 35, enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2000. His service took him to Iraq from December 2002 to February 2004 as a member of the 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion working with the British military helping to rebuild infrastructure and provide humanitarian aid.
Hernandez said he came back from the war zone with perspective.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in our own backyard,” he said.
One of the main components of the Belle Center is the AmeriCorps program, which started its second year here at the beginning of October.
The results of the AmeriCorps volunteers’ work can be found not just in the blocks surrounding the Belle Center, but also on streets across the city.
The program coordinates with the city’s quality-of-life complaint hotline. That means volunteers will clean out abandoned lots, take down graffiti and perform other community service tasks.
In the winter, their activities include shoveling snow from the driveways and sidewalks of senior citizens.
That’s all in addition to the after-school tutoring they offer, as well as the summer camp the AmeriCorps members help run for 150 young people.
“These young adults can make a positive difference, ” Hernandez said.
There are 44 volunteers in the program, known as Buffalo LeaderShape AmeriCorps. They’re all between ages 17 and 24.
Mike Barnes, an AmeriCorps volunteer who lives on the East Side, performs a lot of the small maintenance and repair work at the Belle Center.
Barnes, 21, brings a can-do attitude with him to the center.
“A lot of people say they help,” he said. “This actually is a go-to, get-it-done place.”
AmeriCorps volunteers do more than the cleanups, fix-its and manual tasks.
Just ask 23-year-old Bruce Smith of Buffalo, who is designing and painting the Holy Cross Youth Center across the street from the Belle Center.
Smith is turning the youth center’s walls into a collage of smiling faces, a sprawling family tree and a crisp blue sky coated with puffy white clouds.
In addition to AmeriCorps, the Belle Center is home to several other programs aimed at giving city youth a chance to succeed.
Lenny M. Dowell is the director of the Youth Empowerment Program, which is run at the Belle Center with pupils from School 3.
The program, known as YEP, has been working with 35 young people since they were in fifth and sixth grades, providing guidance in academics, health and wellness, career planning and cultural diversity.
Funded through a $249,000 federal grant received by D’Youville College from the Office of Mental Health in 2006, the program is in its last year.
Program officials have stayed each year with the same set of pupils, who are now in seventh and eighth grades, Dowell said.
Daliana Rosado, a YEP prevention specialist in the first year of a master’s in education program at D’Youville, said many of the children in the program are labeled “at risk,” but most just have behavior problems and are overloaded with responsibility at home.
“They feel comfortable and safe here, and they know it makes a difference for them,” said Rosado, who graduated from Grover Cleveland High School.
And despite the difficulties they face growing up, these young people want the help given at the Belle Center.
“If you commit to them,” Rosado said, “they’ll be here.”
In addition to AmeriCorps and YEP, the Belle Center has a senior program, and adult education run by Buffalo city schools.
Evelyn Pizarro, former principal at School 3, coordinates a program for sixth-through 12th-graders aimed at teaching them practical life skills.
Funded by a $250,000, five-year 21st Century Learning Center grant, the program is broken up into eight-week units offering instruction ranging from computer skills through basic home repairs to cooking classes and handling basic home finances.
The program, which began teaching 150 students from Grover Cleveland and School 3 on Oct. 20, works thanks to a partnership with the city school district, Pizarro said.
Despite the pieces already in place, Belle Center officials say they’re still not finished adding programs.
The center has been trying to establish a day care center since the YWCA of Western New York shut down its day care last year.
While the search for funding continues, the faces of the young people working to make a difference in the city keep Belle Center officials going.
Michael A. Rivera, who’s been president of the center’s board of directors for more than 20 years, called the Belle Center “the best kept secret in the City of Buffalo.”
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