By Khalida Sarwari
When 94-year-old Elena Martinez lost her husband 13 years ago, the Alma Youth and Senior Community Center became her refuge, but the center’s impending closure could have a devastating impact on her and the community at large.
The San Jose Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department is proposing the reuse or closure of the 40-year-old center due to a $149,000 deficit.
At a mock funeral for the center today, Martinez stood before a makeshift casket and amid a crowd of about 60 youth and elderly members from the Alma and Washington neighborhoods to call on the city to save their beloved center.
“You provided us with hot meals when we had no other place to go … you provided us with friendship and smiles when many of us would have withered away within four walls,” Martinez said. “Alma, your name in Spanish means ‘soul.’ And this is what you mean to me and to all of the community.”
Martinez has been a longtime member of Alma Community Center, but she is one of many, young and old alike, who goes to the center for a warm meal, classes and recreation activities, including bingo, field trips, holiday celebrations, dances and daily exercise.
Most of all, the center’s greatest draw for seniors is the opportunities for companionship and socialization it provides.
If it weren’t for the center, Toni Sanseverino said she would “probably stay home and wither away.”
Aron Carrera, a student at San Jose City College, said for the youth, the center serves as a haven for children and an alternative to drugs and violence.
“I am sad to hear the center is closing,” Carrera said. “It makes me think, ‘what will happen to this community without a youth center? I grew up under your wing, Alma. And all the other kids in the community need you like I do.”
Sonny Lara, a gang intervention outreach worker, said in perspective, it takes $72,000 a year to lock up a juvenile in a detention center. With $149,000, the center could save three of those prospective youth, Lara said.
“We need some of you business people to step up and say we can save this place,” Lara said. “We don’t need to bury a kid, we need to resurrect a kid.”
Center volunteer Debbie Morillo said the Alma neighborhood has been identified by the Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force as a high-risk area for gang activity. The city’s suggestion that members switch to one of two other nearby centers is not possible because of gang rivalries in the neighborhood, she said.
The City Council will consider the center’s future at its meeting Tuesday.