ORLANDO SENTINEL

June 24, 2006

Immigrants ministry sees hope in new home

Larger spot will allow expanded programs

Victor Manuel Ramos
Sentinel Staff Writer

APOPKA -- The sandy lot on North Apopka Avenue is full of weeds and untrimmed trees, but three nuns and volunteers who run an immigrants ministry see hope springing from the site.

The Office for Farmworker Ministry, long confined to a one-room storefront it rents on South Park Avenue, held a ceremonial groundbreaking Friday at the lot, where it plans to erect a place of its own.

Hope CommUnity Center, as it will be called, will be a refuge for immigrants and low-income people in Apopka and the vicinity. At 8,120 square feet, the facility will help the ministry expand its outreach, advocacy and educational programs.

The center has been about 34 years in the making, since Roman Catholic Sisters Ann Kendrick, Cathy Gorman and, later, Gail Grimes, settled in the area to work with what used to be mostly migrant farmworkers from Mexico.

Grimes said the ministry, which started in a garage, has survived by "begging, borrowing and stealing spaces" to bring what she calls the real Orlando together. "We have Disney World and we have the other world . . . and this is the real world."

Many former farmworkers and their children are now employed in other areas but continue to call Apopka home. More than 4,800 Hispanics, most of them from Mexico, lived in Apopka as of 2000.

Kendrick told the crowd huddled under a tent at the event that the center will be a place for "passing on hope" to the next generation.

The center, which will cost about $1.7 million, will be on land acquired by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando. The ministry has collected more than $300,000 through bake, plant and garage sales, community fiestas, raffles and private donations.

The ministry is receiving another $770,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, obtained with support from U.S. Sens. Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson as well as Reps. Corrine Brown, Tom Feeney and Ric Keller.

The ministry, though, still needs to raise another half-million dollars so the building can be completed sometime next year.

Kendrick, 61, said the center's opening will mean more after-school and youth programs for teenage girls such as Elisa Rodriguez and Gladys Lopez, both 14 and part of a girls group where they have received tutoring and counseling.

She hopes it will also mean that the work of three "dogged and determined" nuns in Apopka will outlast them.

"We are in our 60s," Kendrick said, "and we need to leave seeds here that will live on in the leadership of our people, and as a place."