It’s nearly noon at Burlington’s Sara Holbrook Community Center. Downstairs, a group of preschoolers is singing a song about the clouds, chanting: “What’s the weather? What’s the weather?” Upstairs, a group of recent adult refugees is learning English, the word huge, and the verb “to be.” The teacher says, “New York City is…”
“Huge!” finish the students.
The scene is apt for a sanctuary that’s offering a much sunnier, and much bigger, future for families in the greater Burlington area. Founded in 1937, the Sara Holbrook Center serves more than 1,400 at-risk people each year with educational programming, a teen drop-in site and a food pantry for emergency assistance.
Part of the Sara Holbrook Center since nearly Day 1, UVM students are also now part of a unique nursing program that’s ensuring healthier lives ahead, too.
“It’s a unique history — UVM reaching out into the community 80 years ago to develop a social service organization,” says Executive Director Leisa Pollander ’79 during a tour of the Sara Holbrook Center, “and it just keeps on going.”
Pollander pauses to point out a photo of Sara Holbrook hanging near the front door of 66 North Avenue in the Old North End, the center’s main site. (The other, for adolescents, is at 130 Gosse Court in the New North End.) “She’s the most intimidating professor I’ve ever seen!” says Pollander with a laugh. “I’d be terrified to turn in my term paper.”
In fact, Sara Holbrook was a UVM professor and a clinical psychologist who worked in New York’s settlement houses that supported newly arrived immigrants in the 1930s before bringing the concept back to northern Vermont. UVM Home Economics Chair Bertha Terrill joined forces with Holbrook to raise money for the center, establishing a bond that has long benefitted Burlington.
“The historical component fascinates me,” says Pollander of UVM’s roots in Burlington’s refugee community, and of the friendship between Holbrook and Terrill that helped build a special place of light, color and hope for the otherwise disenfranchised.
Sure, no Statue of Liberty stands as an emblem of the melting pot here, but as Pollander points out, the Green Mountains have shouldered a second coming of immigrants since becoming a designated federal refugee resettlement site in 1980. From Eastern Europe and “almost every African nation,” she says, to Vietnam, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma, more than 6,000 refugees have found new homes in Burlington.
That has created a need for social workers, who have come out of the longstanding partnership with UVM, as well as for nurses. About six years ago, the Sara Holbrook Center connected with UVM’s Department of Nursing, picking up the practicum for students to work in a nursing setting, and became established as an outpost.
“Because we work with the lowest of the low income, we have families with pressing health needs,” explains Pollander. “And childcare can be the germ pit of the world, so we deal with everything from head lice and viruses to kids who haven’t had immunizations. Many families don’t have the resources to keep a roof over their head or food in their bellies.”
Nourishment, however, goes both ways, as UVM’s Shelby Ferry ’16, reports. She’s at the Sara Holbrook Center every Wednesday and Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; and at the Miller Center every Friday from 3 to 5:30 p.m., after becoming connected with the resource through the UVM Public Health Nursing Program.
“I had no idea that the center existed before hearing about it in class,” says Ferry, who admits challenges in keeping the kids at the Sara Holbrook Center focused on the task ahead, whether that’s playing a game or keeping quiet during circle time. But with their immediate health needs met, happiness unfolds in amazing ways. Ferry won’t forget being able to “witness the pure joy of these children, day after day, with things as simple as drawing a picture or sharing their toys.”
Holbrook herself would (despite her intimidating presence and terrifying portrait in the Sara Holbrook Center hallway) stand a little taller with pride upon hearing such words. What’s the weather? One could say it’s cloudy — or partly sunny. What’s the size of New York City? One could say big — or huge. It’s all about the context of creating futures with a bit more hope.
“I’ve learned a new degree of patience, and how changing your words can make the difference in whether or not a child is going to listen to you,” says Ferry. “It’s also changed my view on nursing by making me realize how children’s brains are so delicate, and that there are so many factors that go into shaping a child’s life.”