Opportunity Center ground broken Opportunity Center ground broken (May 12, 2004)

Jim Burklo, who directed the Urban Ministry for eight years in the 1980s, was honored last week as a kind of father for a new Opportunity Center in Palo Alto, which will provide services and housing for Peninsula homeless.

The occasion was the groundbreaking for the center, to be built at 33 Encina Ave.

"We spent 20 years looking for a landlord: Nobody would take us in," he said to more than 200 people gathered for the celebration. "No longer. Hallelluia! Amen!"

The new five-story building, planned and funded by the Community Working Group, made up of city, county, and religious groups, will provide a drop-in center with food, showers, telephones, computers, and social services on the ground floor, and 89 units of housing on the upper floors.

The Elsa Segovia Center of the Clara-Mateo Alliance at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Menlo Park, will provide services to homeless and near-homeless women and children in a separate space with a separate entrance.

For information or to donate, call 814-6518, or go to www.opportunitycenter.org.

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