CENTRAL KENILWORTH AVENUE REVITALIZATION COMMUNITY DEVELOPME
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : p******r@c*****c.o*g
Mission Statement
"To promote the social, environmental and economic development of Greater Riverdale"
About This Cause
Founded in 2007, CKAR was established to promote the welfare and revitalization of residential and business communities in Greater Riverdale to effect positive change. Our non-profit organization forms strategic partnerships to implement projects in our community in workforce training/job development in culinary arts; environmental sustainability; health and wellness; business retention, advocacy, and support; economic and community development to improve the lives of residents, families, and businesses. In 2010, CKAR formally organized as a 501c3 non-profit organization. In 2016, CKAR honed its focus, strengthened its structure, and developed solid back-office capacity. In our 2017 strategic planning sessions, CKAR Board members simplified the mission statement, “to promote the social, economic and business interests of Greater Riverdale”. After eleven years of operations in Prince George’s County, CKAR has now expanded its service area to a 2-mile radius around its headquarters with Greater Riverdale as its central focus. Our service area now includes the communities of Eastpines, East Riverdale, Riverdale Heights, Riverdale Hills, Crestwood, and Templeton Knolls; communities of Beacon Heights, West Lanham Hills, and Hanson Oaks; and the Town of Riverdale Park. In 2017, with the opening of the Greater Riverdale Career Empowerment Center (GRCEC), CKAR launched a holistic model for workforce development that includes on-site skills training, space for mental health therapists to assist in assessments and other non-profit professionals engaged in job placement, legal services, coaching, resume building, interviewing and computer skills training. In 2020, CKAR joined volunteers from University Park (an adjacent community) to expand its outreach to keep local small restaurants along US Routs One in operation through a restaurant meal program that feeds food insecure families and seniors while keeping the lights on and workers in place. CKAR’s goals are to develop and implement an advocacy strategy to listen, inform and reflect the voice of the community; to improve organizational governance and leadership, to generate sufficient and diverse funding to support and sustain programs and operations; and to maximize our reputation as an effective partner. Our goal is to become a strong community development organization to better serve the community. People in this community feel that they will be forced to move as demolition and new development projects are underway – new restaurants, hotels, upscale markets, and the Purple Line. They feel threatened by these improvements. If CKAR can bring end-to-end job training to the community, the economy will improve with residents filling new job opportunities in employer pipelines. In 2023 CKAR will expand its training program in partnership with Prince George's Community College to include certified culinary arts at CKAR’s new 1,900SF Sarvis Empowerment Café. This facility will have seating for twenty-eight customers inside and seventy-six seats on an adjacent outdoor patio. Students will couple with side-by-side breakfast and lunch café operations to serve 68,000 customers and 3-4 training cohorts annually. Students will receive mentoring while rotating to different staff positions to develop their career pathway. This socio-enterprise is designed to provide sustainability to CKAR through a new source of dependable revenue in the café operations. We also hope to train residents in the community that cannot afford to pay fees for training in partnership with the Town of Riverdale Park. The demographics of this area are 34% are black, 9% white, 3% Asian, 51% Hispanic, 2% are more than two races and 1% are American Indian. Nineteen percent of this diverse low/moderate income and under-served population is unemployed or under-employed. Joblessness is a factor of poverty and contributes to lack of self-worth, spousal abuse, and poor health. Skills development enables mobility. The Sarvis project is an economic development project that will lift the community as it offers occupational training in the culinary arts; customer service and hospitality training programs; and programming in health and wellness to avoid chronic illness. Moving forward, job opportunities will exist in Purple Line operations that need good customer service. Completed construction projects will need continued maintenance. CKAR has engaged several partners through MOUs, working in a collaborative, to implement our programs. For example, we have an MOU with Prince George’s Community College to provide culinary arts training, ServeSafe Food Safety and Sanitation training and ESOL; another MOU with Neighborhood Design Center to address our environmental tree planting work. These collaborations provide added experience, taps the partner’s volunteer base, and expands our outreach. Our programs are sustainable. The Sarvis location will be renovated for culinary arts training and breakfast/lunch operations. The term of the lease on the Sarvis property is 15 years. The interior of 1,555 SF seats twenty-eight customers. The site was used in the 1960s as a cafeteria. The location of the Sarvis project, directly across the business park where our current classroom training facility is located is optimum. The 1,062 SF exterior deck will accommodate table w/chairs for sixty-four customers. The soft opening occurred on July 24, 2023. The first training cohort will begin 2022. Fall 2023. The adaptive re-use of this space will allow us to train seven students in each cohort running side-by-side with an operating café serving breakfast and lunch. This project has attracted interest in our community. We believe that through this project we will be able to recruit more board members and improve the functionality of Board committees to achieve strategic and program goals. This project creates a social enterprise that will add a new source of revenue through the café operations. All excess revenue will be used to establish reserves needed for equipment replacement and operations, staffing, innovative programs and services to benefit the community. CKAR will also develop a Capital Campaign in 2024 to leverage our outreach. We will host community events at the café for further fundraising. We will support programs of other non-profits in the community if allied with our mission.