New center for Boys & Girls Clubs ‘will scream fun’

CEDAR RAPIDS — The Boys & Girls Clubs of the Corridor broke ground Thursday on a new building called The Busse Unit that will provide a safe haven for an additional 300 children to be served.

“It will scream fun,” said John Tursi, executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Corridor.

The unit is being constructed at the intersection of Washington Avenue and 16th Street SE, adjacent to First Congregational United Church of Christ, 361 17th St. SE, Cedar Rapids, which has been a site for the Boys & Girls Clubs since 2004. It is expected to open in July 2024.

Melanie Van Weelden, senior minister at First Congregational United Church of Christ, said she will miss having the children at the church. “I imagine I’ll be over in the (Busse) building as much as I am in my office because I enjoy being with them,” she said. “It’s the best part of my day when they come running by my office.”

  Buy Photo

The church has been purchasing land adjacent to its building for about the last five years with the goal to sell it to the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Corridor, Van Weelden said. The church sold the land to the club for $50,000.

“There are vulnerable kids, and we want to do whatever we can to make life good and happy and give them a future that’s full of wholeness and hope,” Van Weelden said. “We had some really big dreams that seemed kind of crazy at the outset, and now we’re here and it’s kind of surreal to think this is actually going to happen.”

The Busse Unit is being named in recognition of one of the project’s largest donors — the Busse family — who donated $2 million to the project from their family foundation.

  Buy Photo

Each year, the family asks, “Where can we do the most good with the resources we allocate to charity every year?” Jeff Busse said Thursday. He joined the Boys & Girls Clubs’ board of directors in 2002 and the board of trustees in 2010.

“We’re so excited to see the benefits this will have on our local community that our commitment to this project was a particularly big stretch goal for us,” Jeff Busse said. “The contribution is three times larger than the next biggest charitable pledge we have ever made from our family’s foundation.”

The Boys & Girls Clubs of the Corridor is a youth development organization for 5- to 18-year-olds with programs to help kids and teens achieve academic success, model good character and citizenship and live healthy lifestyles. It first opened as the Ellis Community Center in the 1990s. The site was destroyed by flooding in 2008, displacing many families and club members.

Around that time, club directors rethought their mission, going from “How do we get kids to the club?” to “How Do we get the club to the kids?” Tursi said. Since then, they have opened additional sites — four in Cedar Rapids, one in Iowa City and one in Marion.

Most children are able to attend the club for free. If they do pay, it’s $12 per child for an entire year, Tursi said. “Last year, we only had one kid that paid. We’re pretty much a free service,” he said.

The 18,500-square-foot Busse Unit will allow the club to double the number of kids it serves. It will contain a gymnasium, cafeteria, game room, education center, and science, technology, engineering and math lab. On the second floor, there will be a teen center, a teaching kitchen, an art room and a music room with a DJ booth.

  Buy Photo

The kitchen will enable the club to teach kids how to feed themselves and their families. For example, if an adult gives their child $25 to feed themselves and their siblings for the weekend, what ingredients can they buy and meals can they make with that money, Tursi said.

Already, the center serves 53,000 hot meals a year.

The Busse Unit also will be available for community use, Tursi said.

The Boys & Girls Clubs has raised $8.5 million for the project, which will cost about $9 million total. The money raised so far has come from donations and ARPA funding from Cedar Rapids and Linn County. Of the ARPA funds, $750,000 came from the city, and $750,500 came from the county.

Comments: (319) 398-8411; grace.king@thegazette.com