Yours, Ours, Mine Gives Levittown Resources for Life
To young people who've needed resources from employment skills to AIDS and drug-abuse prevention, Yours, Ours and Mine Community Center has been a valued resource for nearly three decades.
"What I've tried to do the last 28 years is not duplicate what other youth organizations have been doing," said James Edmondson, YOM's executive director from the beginning. "It started out as a youth center, (but) the community's needs have changed in the last 28 years. We've tried to change with that by diversifying and trying to provide the kinds of services to maintain and improve the quality of life."
YOM is a not-for-profit, multifaceted human service organization serving residents of Levittown and surrounding communities from the ages of 2 years 9 months to those of senior citizen age.
Edmondson estimates that the organization's youth programs serve 1,400 children and adolescents from Levittown and surrounding communities.
The programs include before and after school child care, 10-week summer child care, a youth employability program which encompasses areas like resume preparation and interviews, and individual, family and group counseling.
YOM's other offerings for young people include the Parent and Child program, sponsored by the Family Services Association (FSA), an AIDS prevention program, a chemical dependency program, a drug and alcohol clinic, a counseling program for adolescents and children of alcoholics, and two 14-week educational series, for alcoholics and for those who abuse other drugs.
There are recreational activities at YOM too -- basketball tournaments and table tennis, for example -- but Edmondson points out that those programs don't aim to compete with those coordinated by the Levittown-Island Trees Youth Council. Instead, he said, they're aimed to attract young people who might need help with other issues in their lives.
"The primary reason for having leisure time activities here at the agency is to attract young people to come," Edmondson said. "If they have problems, we can begin to deal with those problems, and include the family structure within the process."
Much as the other agencies that serve Levittown's young people have done, Yours, Ours and Mine Community Center has added programs that help young people and their parents deal with changing times. Edmondson noted that 307 young people took advantage of after-school child care at YOM, a reflection of the number of Levittown-area families in which both parents work.
Edmondson said a lack of evening activities for many Levittowners age 14 to 17 is an acute problem. He calls those at-risk youth the "non-joiners," people who don't play varsity basketball, wrestling or intramural sports or perform in a school band.
"(They) don't have any place to go at night," the YOM director said, citing the closing of a Levittown roller rink and the raising of the minimum drinking age to 21 in the mid-1980s as obstacles to the "non-joiners" socializing. "There are nine swimming pools in Levittown. Not one is covered."
He also said that 1,300 young people, including some not served by YOM, took part in a center-sponsored bicycling and skateboarding program near the YOM building, a program that was halted when YOM was sued by one parent. But in good weather, "if you go to the memorial park at Levittown Public Library, you'll see them going up on that embankment and scaring motorists," Edmondson said.
YOM is in the position in which many other public agencies find themselves, that of providing more services with less of a funding pool, other than the sliding-scale fees YOM participants pay for programs. Of the community center's $1.9 million budget for 1997, only 56 percent of the funding comes from government agencies, as opposed to 98 percent in 1988.
In addition to Hempstead Town, Nassau County and New York State support, and fees and Medicare reimbursements, YOM receives funding from agencies such as Long Island's United Way, corporations and private foundations.
"Times have changed, and I don't think it's ever going to be the same (again)," Edmondson said. "You lose your staff; you become a training facility because you aren't getting what you need to keep qualified people in positions, which causes serious problems."
Originally, YOM was established to serve a youth base of 500, many of them were hanging out on the nearby Village Green and causing problems with local neighbors. Now, it's a multi-service organization whose current clients are the sons and daughters of its earliest. Edmondson notes that Eileen Ashley, now the secretary of YOM's board of trustees, was one of his early "kids", as was her brother, now a school principal in Narragansett, Rhode Island.
The day-to-day YOM staff has been supplemented by community service workers and students from Molloy College, Adelphi University, the State University at Stony Brook and Nassau Community College.
Setting the policy are members of YOM's board of directors, including current president Fritzi Conway (Mary Orth is the board's president-elect), vice president Marie Palagonia, Board Secretary Ashley, Levittown Schools Superintendent Dr. Herman Sirois, and Nassau County Republican Joe Mondello of Levittown.
Other members of the YOM board include Denise Spruill, Dr. Thomas Tumbarello, Marvin Smith, Bonnie Quackenbush, Thomas McLaughlin and Fred Form.
As an African-American coming into a predominantly white community, Edmondson experienced some unsettling incidents when he was dispatched to set up YOM in 1968. "They wrote bad things on the agency building," said Edmondson, who a few years earlier had opened up the Roosevelt Youth Center, whose young participants included Eddie Murphy and Julius Erving.
Now, Edmondson says that those negative attitudes have mellowed. "People here are friendly," he said about Levittown's residents. "I don't see it as a closed, closed community as compared to what it was in 1968....Certainly, the quality of life has been maintained, and they (residents) saw to it by virtue of all the volunteerism that you see going on."
Although the YOM director feels the organization's future is solid, making ends meet is a constant challenge. Saying that community residents and corporations need to increase their support of nonprofit agencies like YOM, he added that the agencies themselves have to consider pooling their resources by mergers, such as the recently-announced partnership between Children's Health Services and FSA.
"I think that boards like this board will have to certainly consider merging with other nonprofits with common interests," Edmondson said. "Then you have some strength in terms of presenting your mission in a much more positive and meaningful way."
