Hawk-Houston Youth Enrichment Center celebrates 60 years

Mrs. Hawk asked her husband to wander over to the corner and take a look around. When he returned, she asked him what he had seen.

Nothing unusual, he reported. Just kids rolling dice.

“That’s the problem,” she might have said. “These kids need a place where they can be productive. »

This was the genesis of what is today the Hawk-Houston Youth Enrichment Center, now in its 60th year and providing inspiring space and programs for Dothan’s youth.

The organization recently celebrated this heritage at its 2024 Annual Meeting and Recognition Banquet, which also served as the launch of the nonprofit’s Diamond Anniversary fundraising campaign.

The organization’s mission – to provide a world-class enrichment center that promotes the educational, social and personal development of the youth and families it serves – has helped shape generations of young people from an institution born of the former Carver Theater on Chickasaw Street, once operating as a boys and girls club, and now as an enrichment center.

The center recognized the 2023 Alveta Houston Hawk honorees during a presentation by Director Altha R. Newman:

• Young people of the year, Jovanna Jones and Zidarius Brown
• Outstanding Staff of the Year, Hanna C. Walker;
• Partnership, PIC Science: mathematics simplified;
• Friend of Youth, Reverend Michael Anderson;
• Felicia B. Brooks, Board Volunteer of the Year;
• Hawk-Houston Legacy of Service Award Lloyd and Kay Keel of Keel & Company Distilling;
• Hawk-Houston Legacy Donor, Dove Family Foundation; And
• Alveta Houston Hawk Lifetime Achievement Award, Angela Jones Brown.

The event also served as the launch of a reprint of a biography of founder Alveta Houston Hawk’s extraordinary life of service.

Originally published in 2000 by author Elaine Denley Slaughter, the biography “Cookies and Lemonade: A biography of Alveta Houston Hawk” is long out of print.

However, another Dothan-born entrepreneur, James “Shack” Thompson Jr., gave new life to the biography, having reprinted the slim volume through his publishing company, Peanut City Press. The book can be purchased via this link.

Ms. Slaughter, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday last week, took up residence in Dothan with her husband, Clarence, in 1959 and remained active in the community. One of the first female elders in the Presbyterian Church, she became active in a Head Start program in the Baptist Bottom neighborhood and soon became an integral leader in the new Boys and Girls Club, forging a friendship with Mrs. Hawk . “Cookies and Lemonade” is her only published work – “the only book I was made for,” she said.

Ms Slaughter died in an accident in 2012.