Allan Appel Photo
Stetson Branch Librarian Diane Brown (at right) with teen librarian Brooke Jones and children's librarian Phil Modin.
Gary Hogan wants you to know that while the Elks’ light may be temporarily dimmed due to the sale and demolition of their Webster Street building, and while a new club house is in the making further up on Dixwell, they are sponsoring a wide range of new literacy and cultural programs in a partnership with the local Stetson Branch Library.
And the result is, having turned a loss into an opportunity, the group is recruiting more Elks, and younger ones, to the charitable and civic activities of one of Dixwell’s most venerable civic and charitable organizations
That good news emerged Thursday afternoon at a planning session convened at the Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue attended by local Elks’ Exalted Ruler (and Beaver Hills Alder) Gary Hogan, Daughter Ruler Arlice Brogden, City Librarian Maria Bernhey, and long-time Stetson Branch Librarian Diane Brown.
“We’ve a target of about 50 kids,” said Hogan, that he’d like to see attend an upcoming and expanded summer reading program at Stetson, which would be one of the main focuses of the Elks-library partnership.
The Elks, formally known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World (I.B.P.O.E.W) is an African American fraternal order that emerged in the late 19th century and, in New Haven, in 1907, when the white Elks refused to let African Americans join.
“We came about,” said Hogan proudly, “long before the N.A.A.C.P. and the [African American] sororities and fraternities.”
It has profound roots in the Dixwell neighborhood where Christmas and other celebrations, dress-up galas, Thanksgiving turkey-giveaways, funerals, welcome-wagon type activities for new residents, and pivotal community meetings have over the decades been held in their clubhouse.
City Librarian Bernhey, Diane Brown, Arlice Brogden, and Gary Hogan.
So the temporary loss of a clubhouse, Hogan said, has triggered fresh thinking about programming, and thus the natural partnership with Stetson.
Because of those roots in Dixwell, Dwight, and Newhallville over the generations, the Elks know by name and address some of the families in deepest need and the kids requiring lots of mentorship, and those are young people that the new partnership is seeing come into Stetson’s bright new building, where the entire first floor is devoted to kid programming, with the teens and young adults up on the second floor.
In the run-up to the summer reading program, other activities, which began in January, also have included interactive story-telling, families learning together to paint on canvas, a kind of hip hop-based session helping to teach healthy eating habits, a Kwanza event, and, most recently, on Wednesday a two-hour Black history teen hangout.
Stetson’s teen librarian Brooke Jones said you turn the library into a Black history-themed teen “hangout” by providing tasty New Haven style pizza and other good things to eat and drink; you show on a large screen a cool movie, in this case Hidden Figures, the biopic about a brilliant and unappreciated trio of African American women mathematicians who helped John Glen orbit the earth and keep America in the early space race.
And you also have a little machine around where the teens — while talking, eating, and watching the film! — can also learn how to make button badges featuring a favorite figure from African American history.
“The image of the Elks,” said Hogan, “is sometimes its parties, but that’s a fallacy. We’ve been behind the scenes doing essential work in the community since 1907.”
If you think of a kind of combination of the Shriners, the Masons, and the Rotary Club, said Hogan, that’s the New Haven Elks, who are officially Elks Lodge 141, comprised of the East Rock Lodge and the Pocahontas Temple of the I.B P.O.E.W of Elks. And until the new clubhouse rises, both groups have been holding their gatherings at Stetson, Hogan added.
That essential community work includes the Poster Child program, said Brogden — one of her favorite of the formally designated areas of Elks’ activities, the others being civil liberties, youth work, beauty and talent, and education. The Poster Child program entails identifying special needs kids in the community and offering financial, equipment, spiritual, and other support.
Through June of this year other activities being planned include American Red Cross CPR trainings for teens; reinvigorating the Elks’ signature beauty and talent pageant; trips to NBA games for local teens; and one of Hogan’s favorites, an intergenerational senior gala or pageant, where, for examples, teens and an older aunt or mentor celebrate their relationship and in the process show off the cool threads, as we used to say in the 1960s.
“But,” added Brogden, “in the run up the teens are also taught some life skills too, etiquette, and manners.”
“Stetson’s [summer reading program] is one-on-one, group and family-oriented,” added City Librarian Bernhey, a program that last year drew 17 kids and is the target for expansion with the infusion of the Elks’ support.
And it’s also, in no small part, because the Elks are involved, very much family focused.
That often means that a reading-at-the-library experience might begin with a child, but soon one of the teachers learns that some of the parents have literacy struggles as well, and the next thing you know the family is reading together.
“Building family time around reading, more family nights, more books to take home,” said Bernhey are important features of the summer reading program at Stetson that will be augmented through the partnership with the Elks.
“We found adults,” added Diane Brown of last year’s summer reading program “who could not read at all.”
“This is another example,” said Bernhey, of how the library has become a community hub, with bridges to many other organizations (like the Elks). “That’s the thing, a bridge.”
“We are a benevolent, charitable organization teaching young people to learn, to give, to help. We’re embracing young people to show them something different. We have an opportunity to sway the needle in these kids’ lives,” Hogan said.
The next link in that bridge or sway in that needle takes place Saturday, Feb. 22 from 2:00 p.m. to 4 at Stetson, a second “Hip Hop Heals” combining music with health and life style activities. For more information, the number: 203 – 946-8119.
The new programming link with the library, Hogan thinks, is unique in what he termed “Elkdom.” And for that reason — and its success — he and Brogden will be making a presentation both at the state and national levels of the organization in the coming months.
For those interested in participating with the Elks either in programming or in helping to raise the new club house, which will be rising at 321 – 329 Dixwell and “is shovel ready and only awaiting an angel with some gap funding,” said Gary Hogan, the contact is: gbhogan@hotmail.com