Candice Poe came to the new Tolson Center for Community Excellence not quite knowing what to expect.
Poe lives just across Benham Avenue from the new center in Washington Gardens with her three children. She had taken her kids to the old Tolson center but just for basketball and she didn’t know what else the new center might offer.
After coming to the Tolson’s grand opening Thursday evening, Poe was blown away.
“It’s so much better and I love it,” Poe said with a smile. “I think this is going to be a great thing for the community, a great thing for the kids and the adults — because they have things for the adults too.”
Sitting next to Poe was Sharea Evans and her two young children. Evans said she’s already signed them up for reading classes and holiday programming and can’t wait to get going.
Community leaders gathered Thursday said the new Tolson Center can be transformative for neighborhood residents like Poe and Evans. In an multi-million dollar expansion, the new Tolson building includes art rooms, a dance studio, basketball courts, educational spaces, a kitchen and more — all for free.
The center will also offer health screenings and career development and is poised to become more of a city-wide hub than a community gym, according to Elkhart Mayor Rod Roberson.
“This has changed lives for people who have worked and played in this center," he said. "Tolson can do that and has done that. You know what else we can do in this city,”
But the journey to get the new gyms and computer labs and kitchens in Tolson was rocky.
A building that was originally a car wash, the Tolson center first opened in 1991 in the historically Black Benham West neighborhood, though it mostly served as a gym for city youth. The Elkhart parks department ran the center from its inception, but the future of the Tolson veered in a new direction in 2018 when the majority Republican city council voted to stop funding the center.
Outcry over the council’s vote was fierce and Tolson became a rallying cry for the community, with Roberson making it a central point in his campaign for mayor and other community organizations turning their focus to the center.
After the vote, Tolson Center transitioned to a nonprofit governing board that operates the center independently.
The new nonprofit board then took on an ambitious project of modernizing the Tolson Center. There were community meetings and multiple rounds of public input to reimagine what the Tolson into a true community center along the lines of what the Martin Luther King or Charles Black centers are in South Bend.
Director of the Elkhart County Chamber of Commerce Levon Johnson, said he made the center a priority as soon as he walked out of the council chambers after the vote to defund the center five years ago.
“This community center is an example of what Elkhart can do when Elkhart all comes together,” Johnson said.
The cost of the project was originally estimated at around $12 million, but that was before COVID and the rising cost of construction materials bumped it up to near $16 million and caused the project to be completed in two phases.
To pay for the center, the new city council reversed course and approved $5 million for construction and $700,000 a year for the next decade for upkeep. The Lilly Foundation awarded the project $2 million and a state READI grant gave another 2.6 million.
Private donations made up the rest and there is still work to be done in the coming years on a soccer field, a park and additional landscaping.