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An Athens youth center wants to build a kitchen as hunger in the area worsens
By: Theo Peck-Suzuki | Report for America
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — An Athens youth center plans to build a new kitchen to address growing hunger in the area.
This will be a big step up for Sojourners Resiliency Center, which currently makes do with just a refrigerator and a hot plate.
“We’ve been providing ramen noodles and snacks and things like that, but we really, really would love to provide more nutritious hot meals that we can all eat together,” said Director Kelsey Prater.
The center opened in 2020 to provide drop-in services, educational programming and life skills training to youth age 12 to 21.
Prater said that as pandemic restrictions wound down in fall 2022, the center started seeing a growing number of youth arrive hungry. She said the problem worsened with the rollback of COVID-era SNAP benefits in March.
She also noted that hunger makes it harder to do well academically and socially.
The process of installing a new kitchen has proven difficult. One early challenge was finding an electrician.
“It’s pretty universal in Athens County that it’s really difficult to find an electrician who can work within six months,” Prater said.
The project has also hit another snag: Athens code enforcement requires the center to get a state-approved plan to run the necessary wiring for the kitchen. Doing so entails finding an architect, which Prater said is time-consuming and expensive.
Prater said Sojourners is still looking for an architect who will work within the organization’s funding constraints.
She hopes the project will be done in the spring but encouraged youth to stop by before that.
“We would love to see more young people visit. We are doing really great programming. We have D&D every week, we have crafts every Tuesday, we are doing a writing program. We also have music therapy on Wednesdays that we would love to see more people attend,” Prater said.