Pensacola looks to Escambia Children's Trust for $3.5 million children's resource center

Pensacola plans to seek $3.5 million from the Escambia Children's Trust to buy the Morris L. Eaddy Lakeview Activity Center and convert it into a children's resource center focused on healthcare.

"We can really do something great here, and we've said for six months that we can't say that education, we can't say the kids aren't our job," Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said.

Reeves made the announcement about the project during his weekly press conference Monday joined by Allison Hill, CEO of LifeView Group and Lakeview Center, and Dr. Joseph Klawitter, director of pediatrics for Community Health of Northwest Florida.

"This is an idea that has been bounced around for a few months now," Reeves said. "We, again, looked at opportunities on how we can make this a better community for our children, and we started to figure out this project is going to be built around a children's resource center. What that means is an all-hands effort, both by the city of Pensacola with Lakeview (Center), with Community Health (Northwest Florida), and support from Escambia County."

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The Lakeview Center owns the Morris L. Eaddy Lakeview Activity Center, which has a basketball gym as well as office space.

The $3.5 million grant would fund the purchase of the building from the Lakeview Center for $2.9 million and funding the operation of the new facility. Another $442,450 would be provided in matching funds from the city and Community Health of Northwest Florida, according to a city press release.

Reeves said the new facility would provide a centralized place for families to get healthcare for their children while also providing access to programming like a traditional community center.

"It's not so much that these services by themselves don't exist in our community already," Reeves said. "It's the fact at one place that we can make this happen."

The city would run the facility while Community Health Northwest Florida would provide pediatric care out of the building and Lakeview Center would continue to provide behavioral health services.

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"We have parts of our city where less than 50% of the people have access to a vehicle," Reeves said. "So what I really see is there's the synergistic ability for someone to have true wraparound (services) in an area of need in both our city and our county, and be able to go somewhere where they can improve their well-being, improve their health, and improve their education."

Hill said the Lakeview Center served 24,000 people last year, and 6,000 of them were children, many of them in need of things like physical health care or daycare programs that this project will be able to provide under one roof.

"The thought of having all these services co-located is very exciting. And I feel (we have) an opportunity for us to partner in ways that bring services differently than we've seen in the past," Hill said.

Pensacola previously won a $1.7 million grant from the Escambia Children's Trust to fund free afterschool programming for low-income families for three years at city community centers.

Reeves said the children's programs the city offers at its existing community centers put the city in a unique position to run the facility and he saw no problem with seeking funding from the Children's Trust to make it happen.

"I believe in the mission of the Children's Trust, and those dollars are there to help children," Reeves said. "I feel like with our partners and with the city of Pensacola, we have a great opportunity to do that."

Reeve said the city is committed to investing in the community's children, but the long-term cost to the city is minimal if the grant is approved.

"If this goes through, we're in it for the long haul," Reeves said. "We feel like with good partners, and four or five years of runway to start to learn what we need, and what we don't. Obviously, we could look at that, but with this grant we would have the facility."

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola seeks $3.5 million to create children's resource center