Using a snowball approach, hundreds of community members are engaged in a process to figure out what they need most.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: August 15, 2025
Host: Sarasota’s Newtown is well underway to become one of a select few sites nationwide to test a new model that tries to turn schools into hubs for healthcare, social and other neighborhood services. Social entrepreneur Geri Chaffee describes the Newtown Family Center project as “Community Schools Partnership on steroids.” WSLR News talked to Chaffee and two Newtown residents who are mobilizing their community for this project.
Johannes Werner: The Community Schools Partnership model came up as a way to improve academic outcomes at underperforming public schools in low-income areas. The underlying assumption: The more parents and families are involved at school, the better for the students. So why not attract entire families to the campus for other reasons? Five years ago, the Sarasota School District was well on its way to adopt this model, bringing social and medical services to public schools. But then, the pandemic and culture wars sidetracked this project.
Rendering of the proposed Newtown Family Center
Now, the Community Schools Partnership idea is back—but attached to a charter school, and as a private-public partnership.
To explain how this happened, let’s take a quick detour via the Dreamers Academy. Geri Chaffee is a social entrepreneur and the driving force behind this charter school, the region’s first fully bilingual one. Dreamers built its permanent home on the margins of Newtown, Sarasota’s minority majority neighborhood, in a low-profile spot tucked between the railroad tracks and Newtown Estates, east of US 301. The Dreamers Academy move to Newtown happened by default rather than by choice. It came after an odyssey of nine possible land purchases throughout Sarasota—some of which fell apart at the last minute—and four years as a tenant of a Jewish temple southeast of downtown.
But Chaffee fully embraced the Newtown community once the school landed there. So here’s her plan: As the Dreamers Academy is expanding from elementary to middle school, so is its campus. The school has bought 12 acres to the south of its existing campus on Leonard Reid Avenue with plans to build classrooms there. The expansion plan also includes building a Newtown Family Center, next to the Newtown public library and across the street from the neighborhood rec center.
Helen Neal-Ali, Geri Chaffee, and Shinece Davis
Geri Chaffee: It’s transformational because it brings all the resources to one place. It’s staffed by members of the community—people with lived experiences, people who can relate to the trauma that generations have experienced.
JW: This will cost a loose $40 million to build, plus up to $350,000 in annual operating costs, according to Chaffee.
So how far are they towards that goal? For one, she says, it costs less to build the center if it happens simultaneously with the school’s expansion, which is already funded.
GC: What have we done? The news is that we have secured the land. We have the development and resources, architect, builder, and we are now engaging the community. We did not want to really go to the community with this concept until we knew that we could close on the land.
JW: Chafee lined up several partners—including MCR Health, the Sarasota School District, the Family Safety Alliance, the Sarasota Sheriff, the Neighborhood Resilience Project and Ending Hunger. The Florida Coalition for Children picked the Newtown project as a pilot in the state for a national coalition that is supporting similar projects in four states.
Fundraising from private donors will begin soon.
The effects in Newtown go beyond new buildings and service providers. Already, the project is mobilizing hundreds of community members in Newtown.
GC: Right now, we are training and paying people to train and to learn how to become involved and parents advisory committees—how to really envision what is possible and what is needed, because a lot of times these programs get created, and here they are, and nobody uses them because maybe that wasn’t really what the community required.
JW: Helen Neal-Ali is with Sarasota Strong and lives in Newtown. Her organization has been training what she calls “neighborhood experts”—residents who are paid to reach out to neighbors and friends to find out about their needs.
Community members ask themselves, “What’s the BIGGEST challenges families in Newtown are facing right now? / ¿Cuáles son los MAYORES desafos que enfrentan las familias de Newtown en este momento?”
Helen Neal-Ali: What SRQ has done—we’ve partnered with her so that we can get residents in the Newtown area to help us find out what’s needed in the center. We’ve gotten a little grant that we’re able to get residents that live in Newtown to go and do what we call in-interviewing. We train people that were in the neighborhood to talk to their neighbors. So they learned how to do interviewing to find out what’s needed. And then it’s kind-of a twofold thing where not only will we find out what’s needed in the center, but we’ll find out what’s bringing the community together.
JW: The outreach through Sarasota Strong includes what they call micro community interventions, and it covers a wide range of issues—from that tree felled by Hurricane Ian still on a neighbor’s roof to picking up garbage in the neighborhood.
HNA: We came with funds. We got a grant that we would pay people to take the three-day training, and then we’re offering our neighborhood experts $20 an hour for them to go, and they work at least ten hours a week.
GC: This is a block-by-block thing. We’re going to choose a couple of blocks and interview every single person on that block, close it, do a big meeting—and, actually you go to the tourists and say, “Hey, you said you were going to come”—present what we call a hope plan, and that plan is an annual plan with actual strategies and tactics—things that that are doable. This could be as simple as cleaning out that lot.
Map of Newtown showing the proposed Dreamers Academy campus expansions, including the Newtown Family Center
JW: This process has engaged some 150 people and growing. Among them is Shinece Davis—and her family.
Shinece Davis: My boys are involved, yes, and they did participate in this as well. We actually had three generations—my mom, me and my boys—participated. So, yes, we are involved, and we are motivated, and we want this and we’re in for this.
I am a mother of four boys that grew up in this community. And they’ve struggled. They’ve seen—from violence to all of this. And I want to be a part of this. I want to help make change. All of this just screams my name and screams, “Yes, this is what you want to be a part of.”
JW: Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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