By KELSEY AINSWORTH
Northeast News
June 20, 2012

The Whatsoever Community Center held an open house Friday, June 15, to reveal their new community meeting room. Bioethics students from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (KCUMB) renovated the community center’s conference room into a community meeting room.

The year-long project was headed by a group of KCUMB students as part of a service learning experience. The room is now complete with a new kitchenette, 12 by 8 foot stage and music cabinets. The students also sanded and finished the maple flooring, painted over the exposed air ducts, painted the door to the room and removed paneling and crumbling sheet rock from the walls.

“We wanted to put a spark back into the community center and get people and the board excited about it again,” said Brenton Priest, a member of the KCUMB team that made the renovations possible.

The students started off their service project by volunteering at the community center. After volunteering, they got together with Whatsoever and decided that renovating the community room would be the most beneficial change to the center.

To highlight both Whatsoever and the hard work of the KCUMB students, KCUMB provided funding for an open house party to celebrate the finished room. In addition to tours of the new community meeting room, the open house also included refreshments, music and free health screenings and consultations provided by KCUMB’s Dybedal Clinical Research Center.

The new community meeting room will aid the Whatsoever Community Center in the various programs it provides for children and adults. The community center already offers children’s summer day care, preschool, GED classes, career services and free music lessons for children.

Crystal Rice, a representative from Whatsoever, said she was excited for what the new meeting room would bring to the community.

“The room will bring more people from the community together to use this as a resource,” Rice said. “Hopefully, it will resurrect the community center and offer more to the people we already serve.”

Open House Party. What-soever shows off its new community room and offers free health screenings June 15. Pictured from top to bottom: Thi Vo, right, measures the height of a young girl; A look at the new community room. Kelsey Ainsworth