Fellowship Place Breaks Ground

Elected officials joined staff at the Fellowship Place Wednesday morning to break ground on a $1.2 million renovation of the Elm Street mental health care facility.

Fellowship Place offers counseling, job training and placement, tutoring, and other help to people with mental illness or substance dependencies.

For 26 years, it’s been doing so at 441 Elm St. That 1917-era building has been a warehouse and a movie theater in previous incarnations. It was a neighborhood food co-op when Fellowship Place took it over in 1985.

Apart from emergency repairs and placing buckets under roof leaks, Fellowship Place has seen no major renovations since then, said Executive Director Mary Guerrera.

She was joined by Mayor John DeStefano, State Rep. Pat Dillon, and Fellowship Place staff for a groundbreaking ceremony on Elm Street Wednesday.

Planned construction includes improvements to the organization’s main clubhouse room, the addition of much needed bathrooms, a new kitchen, an entry vestibule, and expanded plantings. When the work is complete, there will be 7,173 square feet of new and renovated space.

The result will be a ​“cleaner, more positive environment,” Guerrera said.

Click here for an article on Fellowship Place and its much-needed renovations.

Fellowship Place’s campus extends beyond the main clubhouse building on Elm Street. In includes a collection of small buildings that dog leg over several acres toward Chapel and Dwight streets.

The entrance there as well as the new main entrance on Elm will have card and button access as a result of the renovation, said architect Eric Epstein.

The project will cost $1.2 million. A million dollars was approved by the State’s bonding agency in February, having survived then Governor Rell’s attempts at de-authorization in 2009 and 2010. .

In the intervening months, as design has proceeded, Fellowship raised an additional $200,000 in private donations, said Guerrera.

The work should be completed in six months, with clients moving back from 48 Howe in the spring or early summer, said Fellowship Place’s Board Chairman Ron Netter.

One challenge has been finding a way to avoid any interruption of services for Fellowship Place’s 600 clients.

The very last thing people with chronic mental illness need is a deliberate disruption of their hard won positive routines. So how do you temporarily relocate 600 of them and do so smoothly in order to break ground on a much needed renovation?

Fellowship Place found a solution in renting space from The Connection, a not-for-profit with a similar mission. It took an arduous search for a site in the neighborhood where clients could feel comfortable.

“A lot of effort went into re-location. The main goal was to make a smooth transition,” said Director of Development Melissa Holroyd.

Epstein said that the rent Fellowship Place is paying at the Connection is subsidizing renovation of space there.

In his remarks Wednesday morning, the mayor complimented Fellowship Place for the importance of their mission and for helping to stabilize the neighborhood.

He also joked that he is also glad the building permit fees were paid. ​“Go, Fellowship Place,” he said.