New owners acquire former El Dorado Youth Center

West Central Missouri Community Action Agency is proud to share their latest investment in El Dorado Springs. The agency has purchased the renovated El Dorado Youth Center, formerly referred to as the Liston Center. The purchase includes the renovated school building and its property that equate to 3⁄4 of a city block located on North Main Street.

The purchase will serve Cedar, St. Clair and Vernon county, as a community hub in the southern territory of the agency’s service area. A community hub development is aimed at generating more local support for education, local entrepreneurial resources and building community partnerships. These partnerships will foster more sharing of knowledge and generate innovating concepts that will create more working together on community needs.

The success of collaboration has already impacted El Dorado, for the past few years.  West Central has been collaborating with the Eldorado Youth Center, Inc. board of directors, Eldorado Parents as Teachers, On My Own, Inc, and many community volunteers. These collaborations have guided development of various workforce development courses, a feasibility study about local food processing and an independent financial empowerment support group for those struggling to improve their opportunity of constraints due to poverty. 

PR Needs:

NAP Credits

Quote from CT

Research about Community Hub

Specifically, from the perspective of the local community, maintaining good levels of engagement ensures that community hubs are consistently aware of the changing needs of the community and can adapt or develop new services that can meet these needs. Subsequently, meeting community needs helps to raise local awareness of the community hub and the services it provides, in addition to generating an increased willingness by the local community to support the business by providing volunteering time or financial donations, allowing businesses to continue to survive through difficult periods. Building partnerships where local community needs cannot be met by the community hub, many hubs reported the importance of building partnerships with other service providers, so that appropriate services can be sought out to meet those needs, i.e. working with specialist partners to deliver a specific service in-house, or signposting community members to other services in the local area. Community hubs also highlighted the importance of these partnerships for the sharing of knowledge, in addition to sharing best practice, generating innovative ideas and working together to develop funding proposals.

However, it was also recognized that when developing partnerships with other service providers a willingness and open-mindedness to explore new areas and ideas is required, while still recognizing potential limitations and risks. Examples of how community hubs have developed relationships with key partners such as other charities and public bodies include leasing workspace within the hub to other service providers, identifying a local community need and researching and approaching the appropriate service provider to fill that need, and aligning with other providers that fulfill a particular need within the local community, e.g. the local