Looking for Housing: Discovery, pt 1

Met with Sheryl S, at Discovery Prep. She showed us the campus facilities which could work for us though there are a couple of challenges we’d have to plan for—one is easier than the other.

The school has 18 classrooms, a great kitchen (provided that the stove and oven work, which we think they do), and an adjacent good size room that could serve as an Institute dining room and classroom or common room. There are two options for where we could set up outdoor showers. It’s all very cozy and workable.

Youth Speak Collective an organization that has agreed to be a community partner on our project is also a partner of Discovery Prep and they have a dedicated room on the campus.

The two challenges are the shower situation (easy) and this:

The First United Methodist Church of Pacoima owns the school’s facilities. The Church would need to approve our use of the school property. Also the Church uses the kitchen and dining hall on Sundays. Also the Church recently told the school to close and vacate the premises with relatively short notice for the funeral of a prominent community member. The relationship between the school and the church as landlord sounds like it's been a tricky one and experienced some unfortunate difficulty when the school was under previous leadership. The current school leaders are striving to rebuild positive cooperative relationships.

One other question is that the kitchen is not up to code. I am not sure exactly what this means, but I think as long as it is safe it doesn’t need to be up to code for our purposes, only for official purposes like feeding students or a paying public. Sheryl is less convinced than I that our project doesn’t need to pass the kitchen code test and will look into what the guidelines are.

Next steps: Sheryl will talk with the church to suss out the chances for approval for our project. If it signs are good then we’ll try to arrange a meeting and/or a presentation for the church’s board. It could be great to feature the church congregation as one of the community groups represented in the project, as well as the school’s residential neighbors which include a trailer park.

We should definitely continue pursuing housing at other schools.