North Side Non-Profit Expands To New South Side Location

The Albany Park Community Center (APCC) will soon be operating out of a second location in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Photo Credit: Provided by the Albany Park Community Center
The Albany Park Community Center (APCC) will soon be operating out of a second location in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Photo Credit: Provided by the Albany Park Community Center

North Side Non-Profit Expands To New South Side Location

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

The Albany Park Community Center (APCC) recently announced that it will soon open the new APCC-South service center at 4455 S. King Dr. in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The new location will provide several different services to the community, including counseling services, community access to a newly designed computer lab, and job training programs.

The APCC is a nonprofit, community- based organization that is headquartered in the Albany Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. APCC was incorporated on Sept. 24, 1975, and since then has been working to provide education and support for members by offering an array of programs and services for individuals, families, groups, and businesses, according to a press release announcing the expansion.

“We were incorporated in 1975 to provide counseling services and what began as an organization focused on counseling services has grown over the past 40 years to include early education and school-age programs and adult education, employment, and training programs. Our counseling department has grown to include counseling, mentoring, and family support services and we also have a robust business development program,” said Monica Woodson, CEO of the APCC. Services at the new APCC-South facility are set to kick off mid-November, according to Woodson.

“We have discovered through our data gathering that we have a significant number of clients who are coming from different parts of the south side to access our services,” said Woodson. “We recognized that making the trek from south to north is not always an easy feat in this city.”

The need to create greater accessibility for their south side clients mixed with the need for more space to operate their growing programs is what motivated the APCC to establish the new location in Bronzeville.

“Quite frankly, we wanted to be able to meet the needs of our clients but we also needed additional space,” said Woodson. “We are very fortunate that a lot of our programs are growing and we really had outgrown the space at our Kimball location.”

Woodson said she even resorted to giving up her office to provide more space for the growing counseling services that the APCC provides.

Step one of successfully operating out of the new APCC-South facility will be to host a series of community listening sessions with established neighborhood non-profits, schools, and leaders to determine what kind of partnerships can be forged, how the APCC can fit into the mix, and how they can best support south side residents.

“One of our primary goals is to establish partnerships with the organizations that are already doing great work in the community and work with them to identify any unmet needs and if there is something there that aligns with our mission and vision we want to be able to help address those unmet needs,” said Woodson.

For more information, visit www. apccchgo.org. You can find the APCC on Facebook or follow them on Twitter @ apccchgo.

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