The following is an excerpt from an article written for Community Heart & Soul. CLICK HERE to read the full content.

A Community Center at the Center of a Community’s Progress

Fort Lawn’s Main Street is not the metonym “main street” one might imagine in small-town, rural America. Rather than rows of storefronts tucked behind sidewalks with ample parking in front where residents come to eat, to recreate, to be somewhere other than home that helps give a sense of the town’s identity, houses line each side of the road. But past the houses, near the very end of Main Street, you’ll find, as we did, the place where townsfolk congregate – the heart of the community’s revival, the many-piston engine driving today’s progress: the Fort Lawn Community Center.

Located near the end of the town’s Main Street, the Fort Lawn Community Center is where you’ll find a lot of there there in this South Carolina town. Located near the end of the town’s Main Street, the Fort Lawn Community Center is where you’ll find a lot of there there in this South Carolina town. The building, once a schoolhouse, had sat vacant for decades until a group of residents gathered to develop plans for a renovation in the 1990s. By 2001, the Center opened with a wish list of events and programming that could happen there, including in education, health and wellness, recreation, and the arts.

Fast-forward to January 2017. Another renewal effort had begun in earnest. Two critical parties collaborated: Three dozen residents throughout the region, and the leadership at the Arras Foundation, a nearby health legacy foundation in service to the health and wellness of area residents.

The Foundation had learned about Community Heart & Soul, a resident-driven process to help guide community development. The Arras team committed funding to bring Community Heart & Soul to both Fort Lawn and nearby Kershaw. (Community Heart & Soul is a partner and supporter of Our Towns reporting.) The process formally launched in March 2018, led out of the Fort Lawn Community Center, and included the entire 29714 ZIP code, a population of about 3,300.

The group of volunteers surveyed some 640 residents in-person – at community events, at the town hall, at festivals, in church parking lots – virtually anywhere they could amass an audience, including over 1,200 interviews over the phone or via Zoom, to learn what mattered most to residents. What they heard yielded the community’s “Value Statements,” a blueprint of what work to continue, what to develop, and what to aspire to.

Turning Talk to Action

Michelle and I first met Mick Harrington in front of the Community Center. Mick greeted us with a handshake and a hello and, likely after we detected the absence of a South Carolina drawl, quickly shared he wasn’t from around there.

Mick had moved to Fort Lawn from California in 1999, and eight years later made his way to the Community Center, where he volunteers, and joined the Heart & Soul team. “I retired in 2016, and after a year of sitting on the couch, I needed something to do,” he told us. “As Libby (the executive director of the Fort Lawn Community Center) would put it, I lived in a silo – I was just pretty much in my own neighborhood, my little world. So, I came down here and saw the ‘volunteers needed’ sign, and walked in the door. It was the best blessing.”

Knowing Libby Sweatt-Lambert, the silo-busting, frenetically-yet-coolly-always-on-the-move leader is critical to knowing the story of the town’s renaissance.

Libby had built a career across the Carolinas working in the human services field. Energetic and persistent, Libby had served in a role for 12 years where her predecessors lasted just two. But at 50, just six weeks into retirement, she’d grown restless.

That eventually led her, about 10 years ago, to the Community Center, where, on a warm, late-August morning last year, Libby guided us through the center complex.

Just inside the main building, a poster of Fort Lawn’s Community Heart & Soul Value Statements – the results of the stories gathered during the Heart & Soul process – greets visitors. The Statements focus on: Attractions/Points of Interest; Economic Development; Education; Environment; Recreation; Small-Town Feel; and Safety.

The Community Value Statements, generated by the story-gathering process conducted throughout the 29714 ZIP code, greet visitors inside the Fort Lawn Community Center’s main building.

At first glance, one might wonder: What town doesn’t care about education? About safety? About…?

But the process helps residents of any town move from the general to the specific. Throughout the 29714 ZIP code, residents declared: “We believe that quality education in many forms is important for our community to continue. We value our Community Center for the many and varied educational programs and opportunities it provides.”

With school districts consolidating over the years, residents identified the pulse of education palpitating locally in the Community Center.

The process also helps guide the how, turning ideas to action items. In this case: Implement a new K4 program; promote having more classes, including the arts; and provide services for first-time moms – all at the Fort Lawn Community Center.

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Seeing the ‘there’ there

Before we visited Fort Lawn, some warned us that there was no there there – shorthand for the absence of that Americana Main Street core. There may not be rows of retail running along Main Street, but we did find a lot of activity and energy, with most of it flowing through and out of the 10,000 square feet of the Community Center.

Like:

• The South Carolina First Steps Pre-K and kindergarten (the only one in the area, which increased its enrollment from 12 to 15 since we visited with ambitions to admit 20 kids soon).
• Art classes through the Art of Community Rural South Carolina project.
• Senior meals (serving nearly 20 a day, Mondays through Fridays).
• Assistance offered to residents in need of help with housing and utility costs.
• A physical therapy business leasing space (so that residents don’t have to commute to receive services).
• The homelessness prevention program

And like, and like, and like.

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