A nonprofit organization that serves children and families throughout the Lansing region plans to take over part of McLaren Greater Lansing’s Greenlawn Avenue hospital campus.
Child and Family Charities plans to consolidate all of its programs to one location in south Lansing, which Julie Thomasma, CEO of Child and Family Charities, said is an area that needs its services.
“We’re just trying to keep everything on one campus and make that really simple for everybody to be able to get the services they need,” Thomasma said. “Specifically south Lansing, this is an area that we have been serving for many years.”
Child and Family Services has been supporting children in mid-Michigan for 110 years. It runs 25 programs that provide mental health, child care, adoption and foster care, child abuse prevention and housing support services.
“A priority was to replace our shelter for the homeless and runaway youth program,” Thomasma said.
The McLaren McCree House, a hospitality house, will serve as the new home of the youth runaway program, allowing the organization to double its services for the community, Thomasma said.
After seeing the McCree House, Thomasma and members of the Child and Family Charities youth advisory board noticed an educational center across from it, she said. The board suggested the nonprofit use the educational center as a youth drop-in center, giving the organization a physical location youth can come to and feel safe.
“At any given time, there’s about 1,000 homeless youth in the tri-county area,” Thomasma said. “Our goal with creating this campus is to serve an additional 1,500 people per year and increase our reach. Right now, we reach about 8,000 in the local community and 15,000 statewide.”
Lansing City Council member Adam Hussain said this location change is a win-win for Child and Family Charities and the south Lansing neighborhood.
McLaren Greater Lansing is consolidating its Greenlawn and Pennsylvania hospital campuses to a new facility scheduled to open this spring on the southwestern edge of Michigan State University. The community was concerned what would happen to its current campuses when McLaren announced it was going to build a new health care facility, Hussain said.
“Those types of properties are not always easy to repurpose,” Hussain said. “And so I think they were concerned about blight, they were concerned that it would become an eyesore.”