Frequently Asked Questions

June 5, 2025

Dear Neighbor,

We are reaching out with an update for you regarding the construction of the Mark Stebbins Community Center (MSCC) within the Kelley Falls Residential campus.  You don’t need us to tell you that activity is well underway and we plan to hold an official groundbreaking ceremony this month to celebrate and to “dig in.”  The Center will focus on providing services for youth and families on the West Side. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Manchester and Amoskeag Health will be providing services for youth and families through the Center here on the West Side, just as they do now on the East Side.  All services will be specifically for youth and families, such as affordable, walkable before and after school care, access to affordable health care, community meeting space and additional needed support services in coordination with fellow nonprofit providers.

The site surveys are complete and work is beginning for the roughly 20,000 sq foot center.  Although we are confident the impact on all of you will be minimal, our presence will be seen, heard, and felt from time to time.  We wanted to reach out and give you some information about our project, so that you may better know what to expect.

For example, you may have felt some ground shakes and tremors here and there.  Our crews are working to literally prepare the ground for the foundation, which involves steps in our process such as impacting and some digging.  We want you to know that our operations will follow the ordinances, such as the rule that we must do our work within the hours of 7am-5pm unless there is a site emergency.

We want to keep you informed about the steps in our process as best we can.  Here are a couple of examples:

1. The continuous roller compaction you have felt in the past week or so was completed as of Monday. This continuous roller compaction will restart for two other periods during the summer.
    
2. Foundation backfill will be done by a plate compactor. This work will be done over the course of a week in late June.  We anticipate that this type of compaction will be less impactful to the neighborhood.
    
3. Trenching work at the site will also require soil compaction. The trench backfill will be done by both plate and roller compactor. This work will continue through July and is expected to be intermittent throughout the work day.
    
4. A vibratory roller will be used daily to stabilize the worksite soils; this is a condition of our State Permit. This is planned for at least 2-3 hours each day, whether continuous or intermittent.
    
5. The vibratory roller compaction should reduce in frequency once the site is paved.

These are a few examples of the work you might hear and feel as we get ready for the first exciting steps of this community center.  Some of you have reached out and it has been a pleasure getting to know some of our new neighbors.  We know this kind of work can be disruptive, but we intend to work as efficiently as possible with as little impact on all of you as we can.

Moving forward, we will remain in touch.  We will continue efforts to stay connected to you and your neighbors to offer updates and to answer questions and any concerns you may have.  We will update our website, share information on social media and continue direct outreach to you.  You can find us at markstebbinscommunitycenter.org.

If you have any questions, please reach out through email: [email protected].  We deeply appreciate all the support you have shown to us already and can’t wait to complete this project by the fall of next year.

With warm regards,

Bill Steele, Chairman of the MSCC Board of Directors

The new site is located at the Kelley Falls residential community, located on Kimball Street.  A dedicated space for a community center was recently incorporated into plans for the improvements being made at the Kelley Falls neighborhood/community and received support from the local community and the city to move forward, but at that time partners had not yet been identified to make that dream a reality.  This opportunity became a natural option for a new site for this project began anew. 

In short, we believe this will have a positive impact given the new services available to the families who live close by and are already patients/members of Amoskeag Health and the Greater Manchester Boys & Girls Club.  A substantial number of those who utilize the facility will be within walking distance and many others are families connected to serve families on the West Side.

We anticipate construction will be complete in Summer 2026.

We don’t anticipate the traffic impact to go much beyond what already exists, as many of the youth and families will be walking to the Center, taking the bus, or coming over after school.  We anticipate a mild increase in traffic, but the neighborhood has multiple points of access which will help us streamline traffic flow and minimize neighborhood impacts.  This project will include a traffic study, which will be a priority issue for this project. 

We are committed to having green space and outdoor activity space. Green space is very important.  The wooded buffer that currently sits between the site and neighboring homes will not be touched in this project.

The Center will focus on providing services for youth and families on the West Side.  Boys & Girls Club and Amoskeag Health will be providing services for youth and families through the Center here on the West Side, just as they do now on the East Side.  These two organizations have been providing services in partnership for years.  Additional services to address food insecurity, and additional support for children and families will be integrated into the community center. All services will be focused on youth and families, such as affordable, walkable before and after school care, affordable health care,  access to healthy food, community meeting space and additional resources provided by our nonprofit partners.

The conversation about this community center has been ongoing for a few years.  We held community meetings, conducted community surveys, and will continue to reach out directly to residents who live nearby to offer information and a way for them to contact project leaders with questions or concerns.  We will update our website, share information on social media and continue outreach to the neighborhood. 

We had an initial meeting of the Center’s steering team in November 2021.

We will be raising funds from individual donors, local and national foundations and companies.

The Center is a nonprofit and will pay for all construction and operating expenses through raised funds.  Taxpayers and/or residents of the city will not be paying for any aspects of the Center.

There are already several interested funders for the project.  While it may take some time to secure all necessary dollars, we are confident this project will move forward to serve West Side children and their families in some meaningful capacity through the Greater Manchester Boys & Girls Club and through Amoskeag Health.

The center will be 20,000 square feet, well within the size limitations for this land site.

A group of volunteers, including non-profit staff members and community members was gathered and met over a few months (January 2022 through April 2022) to review the available data from community needs assessments completed in the last 3 years, such as the 2019 Manchester Needs Assessment put together by the Manchester Health Department, and other publicly available data from sources like the Census. We also pulled in a list of currently available services from organizations like 2-1-1 to assess what was currently being offered within 03102 census tracts. We then analyzed common themes that came out in the data, and looked at those by census tract.  We also looked at the bus routes, and where some of those services were located. Using this information, we did a survey of residents to confirm that the areas of need we had identified from the data made sense from their perspective, and to prioritize the areas they felt were most important in the area of services for children and families.

Fortunately, the public’s awareness of this effort is high, especially on the West Side.  For the new site at Kelley Falls, we have begun an informational effort to keep local residents and neighbors informed and updated. It remains our intention to work closely with the local community and address any issues, now and in the future.  

Contact:  [email protected]