Sylvia Meredith, Director, Alzona Preschool and Child Care Center, Phoenix, Arizona

What do you think of when you hear the word Community? Is it the people or families you work with, your neighborhood, or does it reach farther? How do you relate with your community and what relationships does your community have with your program? How would Jesus describe community?

Alzona Lutheran Preschool was opened July 13, 1978, as a ministry to the community, and we are now caring for the children of children that we provided care for 15 to 20 years ago. We are located in an area of South Phoenix, which has been labeled as one of the lowest income, highest crime and gang areas in the city, but Alzona has become a ‘safe haven’ for the children and families in this community.

At Alzona, Community is every child who walks through our door, every parent and prospective parent who inquire about our program. It is the Naval Reserve Center around the corner, the grocery store down the street, the Elementary and Middle Schools that “our” children attend. It is the High School across the street and every student who has in some way been a part of or has touched our program. It includes the company we have a public/private partnership with, it even reaches across town 50 miles to the store that donated items to be raffled at our Community Harvest Festival and to the church in Sun City whose Men’s group had a fundraiser for the preschool. Community has no walls or boundaries— it only has the limits we place upon it.

Alzona doesn’t have your ‘typical’ clientele who work traditional 9 to 5 jobs. A lot of our clientele are single parents who work two jobs to make ends meet, work odd hours and don’t have the luxury of working ‘Monday – Friday’. Alzona has a diverse ethnic population, which come from various countries around the world. Many of our staff are bilingual and share with parents and children alike.

When I came to Alzona six years ago, I knew God had brought me here for a reason. Within months of arriving, I began to hear of the community need for infants, evenings, early mornings, and even weekend hours of care from parents who worked “non-traditional” jobs. About five years ago, Alzona did a community needs assessment in conjunction with an Expansion-Enhancement Contract provided by the Arizona Department of Economic Security (DES). This needs assessment done with current

clientele, as well as three major corporations in the area, made us aware of the lack of affordable quality childcare, the desperate need for those “non-traditional” hours of care, and lack of infant care. Fortunately, tied in with this DES Contract was four years of funding for $200,000. As a result of being awarded this contract, Alzona was able to reach out to the community to assist with meeting their needs for “non-traditional” evening and weekend hours and Infant Care.

Alzona also has an ongoing relationship with the community high school across the street. Up until just a few years ago, the students from their Agra-business program worked on a weekly basis with our Preschoolers. The “big kids” as our students called them, would come to the center and help them learn about how to grow plants and what farm animals were and how they grew. It was sad when the school district discontinued the Agra-business program, but since then several clubs from the school have partnered with Alzona to have their students do community service at our center. It’s so wonderful to see these big high school seniors, boys and girls alike, down on the floor playing cars or blocks with the Ones or Twos, sitting with a small group of Threes reading a story, playing puppets with the Preschoolers, or tenderly rocking and loving an infant.

The high school’s Home Economics classes also participate with the center. After several weeks of learning about Child Development, the students plan “development-

tally appropriate’ lessons and then implement them with our children. I have been told that Alzona’s participation with the high school is a sort of ‘birth control’, as the high school students are able to see what is involved with caring for infants and children. Many of the students have their first real exposure to children while at the center and are able to see the wonders of childhood in a group setting. As one teacher put it, “This exposure does one of three things for the students, it clarifies for them that they want to work with children, that they don’t ever want to work with children or it totally confuses them as to what career they want to go into.”

Alzona has many families from the Naval Reserve Center that utilize our center. One of the benefits of this has been the Navy Seabees helping with constructing a shade structure on our Toddler’s Playground, painting the classrooms, removing a block wall between two classrooms, doing plumbing and electrical work, installing insulation before we installed our dropped ceilings, planting trees, and the list goes on. The Seabees have enjoyed the experience and were more excited about the jobs on their duty weekends, as they knew that their work wasn’t going to be torn down at the end of the weekend. The reservists have also had several canned food drives for the center for Thanksgiving and Christmas as well as participated with our Community Harvest Festivals.

When Jesus went into the villages to do His teaching, He didn’t limit himself to ‘His community”, for God had created the world and everything in it. Jesus was faithful in going out and teaching all nations, planting seeds not only on fertile ground but in every community.

Taking a line from one of Steven Curtis Chapman’s songs “I can see the finger prints of God”, Alzona is planting seeds, just as Jesus did, in the lives of our children, which are a reflection of the fingerprints of God in this community.

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