Published: August 03, 2008 10:39 pm      

FALLS FACILITY: New outreach program finds home in 18th Street Resource Center

No matter how you measure it, it’s a long way from Turks & Caicos in the Caribbean to the Falls.

If you’re about start school at Niagara University while at the same time expecting your first child, life can almost be overwhelming.

Yet for Ofelia Rigby, the Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center’s Community Health Worker Outreach Program was the answer to her needs.

“I did not know anyone in the Falls,” Rigby said. “But when I called, they were so helpful. I didn’t know what I was gonna do, but they made a difference.”

The center is based out of both the new 18th Street Community Resource Center and the Center’s Mizer Center. Co-ordinator Kim Congi said the program is designed to provide pregnancy screening, pre-natal education and support as well as a host of other services.

“We assist clients with getting the assistance they need,” Congi said. “We helped (Ofelia) get a doctor and health insurance. We set her up for (other services) too.”

With her now five-week-old daughter Celeste sleeping in a car seat nearby, Rigby sits in the 18th Street Center reflecting on how the program has helped her.

“If they can help me, and I’m not even from here,” Rigby said, “they can certainly help the people from here even more.”

Congi says that desire to reach deep into the community is one of the reasons the program has ventured from it’s Medical Center home and set up shop, every Thursday from 2 to 4 p.m., at the 18th Street Center.

“It’s important for us to go into the community we’re trying to serve,” Congi said. “(The 18th Street Resource Center) is absolutely perfect for us. (People are) more comfortable when they can go someplace local. It’s not as intimidating as a big hospital.”

Community Health is just one of dozens of programs and groups that are operating out of the 18th Street Center. Opened in May, it has also hosted the Niagara Falls Block Club Council, the Healthy Neighborhoods Program, Planned Parenthood’s youth peer counselors training program, the Weed & Seed program and a nearby church group.

The Falls Police Department’s recent Citizen's Police Academy was conducted at the Community Center and The Niagara Falls Board of Education is planning on using the center for tutoring when school resumes in the fall.

Funded by the city’s Department of Community Development, the 18th Street Center was originally envisioned as a new police sub-station. However, Police Superintendent John Chella said former City Administrator Bill Bradberry had much bigger idea for the building.

“Bill Bradberry had the vision of the police department getting the funding and then morphing (the sub-station) into much more,” Chella said.

Chella called it “a natural extension of community policing.”

For example, later today, the Falls Fire Department will be team up with city housing inspectors at the center and then go door to door in the neighborhood to met residents and address fire safety and housing issues with them.

“It’s more than a (police) sub-station,” Chella said. “At the heart of it, the emphasis is a community resource.”

Chella hopes that broader mission will mean the 18th Street Center doesn’t fade away and end up as a boarded-up building again as other police-only sub-stations have in the past.

“We’re there now because our crime maps are telling us that is the (neighborhood) with the highest concentration of crime now,” Chella said. “But we don’t consider it just a police resource. It’s multi-purpose (facility) and I think that bodes well for its success.”