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Masters-Backed MCG Foundation Collaboration Breaks Ground

April 6, 2021

A few hundred friends and supporters celebrated the start of construction Tuesday for the HUB for Community Innovation, an outreach center in Augusta’s Harrisburg community.

Originally posted by the Augusta Chronicle at https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/local/2021/04/06/augusta-national-masters-collaboration-helps-harrisburg-hub-innovation-break-ground/7048649002/


A few hundred friends and supporters celebrated the start of construction Tuesday for the HUB for Community Innovation, an outreach center in Augusta’s Harrisburg community.


The project began 18 months ago when the MCG Foundation, which owns much of the land around the former 15th Street Kroger property, connected with project co-leaders the Community Foundation of the CSRA and the Boys & Girls Clubs of the CSRA in an effort to create sustainable change in Harrisburg and the Laney-Walker communities, which flank the downtown medical district, organizers said.


Previously:Augusta National leads way for $10M gift to city’s urban neighborhoods


As if divinely ordained, this vision very quickly caught the interest of the Augusta National Golf Club,” Britney Pooser, the MCG Foundation's outreach director, said at a tree-planting ceremony Tuesday.


Augusta National, home of the Masters Tournament, contributed through the Community Foundation – its frequent charity partner – along with corporate partners AT&T, Bank of America and IBM for a combined $10 million to launch the project, with additional funding coming from donations and grants.


In announcing the gift last year, Augusta National Chairman Fred S. Ridley said it will “provide the majority of funding needed for this first step in the journey to uplift these underserved communities and, importantly, to promote generational change and the opportunity for economic mobility all Americans deserve.”


The HUB will consist of two buildings with an aligned mission: One is a new 16,000-square-foot Boys and Girls Clubs headquarters. The second is a 33,000-square-foot facility that will house four local nonprofits – Augusta Locally Grown, the Augusta University Literacy Center, Harrisburg Family Health Care and RISE Augusta.


“As an anchor tenant and partner in the HUB, we will focus on creating sustaining solutions to a host of community challenges that once felt intractable … were it not for a group of people who dream big,” said Kim Evans, the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the CSRA, now in its 70th year serving the Augusta area.


The new Boys & Girls Clubs facility will be a state-of-the-art support center that will help the organization extend the reach and impact of services that focus on youth mentoring, college readiness, workforce readiness, virtual programming and more, according to Evans.


Shell Berry, the Community Foundation's CEO and president, said the 2017 Kroger closing “brought into clear focus” many of the issues so pervasive in the Harrisburg and Laney-Walker communities.


“I’m referring to community disinvestment – challenges that were years, decades and generations in the making,” she said. The partners set about to develop something that is "additive, rather than extractive" from the community.


That meant bringing everyone to the table, and “what emerged is the project we are here to celebrate this morning,” Berry said. “We are calling it the HUB, and once it is complete in the spring of 2022, it will truly be a center for community innovation unlike anything else in Augusta.

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