It
Takes a Neighborhood…, Susan Green, Seven
Days
Thirty years ago, three Burlington, Vermont, moms with five
children each started the King Street Youth Center, transforming
the ‘South End’ neighborhood into a thriving community. Susan Green
marked the organization’s anniversary last weekend in Burlington’s
alt-weekly Seven Days, recalling the Center’s early
days and many achievements: ‘While the Pentagon spent taxpayer
dollars on napalm and landmines,’ Green writes, ‘it was no picnic
for the founding mothers to keep the amorphous King Street Youth
Center going in the early days.’ Starting with a van, three
baseball gloves, and $90, the founders built the program into a
$630,000 operation with 22 staff members and 20 interns. ‘Of the
many idealistic enterprises that sprang up in Burlington in the
late ’60s and early ’70s,’ Green writes, ‘the King Street Youth
Center is among the few that have endured.’
–Sara V. Buckwitz
Go
there>>
