Harbor Gateway completes a dream

 

Moevao Liavaa

Moevao Liavaa is the senior lead officer for the Harbor Gateway area. He's seen the racial violence that can tear communities apart, and on Saturday he saw a vacant lot — which he remembers being covered in four-foot shrubs a few years ago —  turned into a community center.

He had something to say about what it looked like now: "I just feel like tearing up and crying, because looking at this come through is just awesome."

On May 2, ShareFest volunteers turned a dirt lot that had been acting as a community center for years into a full-blown facility for kids in Harbor Gateway.

In 2006, 14-year-old Cheryl Green was killed by a gang in Harbor Gateway, and three years later, her name adorned a community center that the everyone from the L.A. mayor to the smallest kids in the neighborhood rallied behind.

On the Friday night before the Workday, Cornerstone Construction Group, Inc. — who worked asked for help from ShareFest on Extreme Makeover Home Edition — transported the a module that the LAPD Harbor Division donated for the center. Through the whole day Saturday, Cornerstone, volunteers from Kings Harbor Church and families from the community put in at least $50,000 worth of labor to turn the module into a working community center in one day. Soon, the Boys and Girls Club will start running programs out of the center.

"It's like a long dream for them (Gateway residents) that's finally come through," Liavaa said

Last year ShareFest helped paint murals for the center and provided what it could to make the space more inviting, but that was nothing compared to the work put in on Saturday and the long years the community had waited for it to happen.

"Because of all the violence that's taken place, hopefully this will draw them closer together and bring them together as a community," he said. "If we can change two, three kids, deter them from joining gangs or doing drugs, to me that's a success. If we can touch just a couple of kids and make them go on and be successful, that's worth all this."

 

The inside of the Cheryl Green Community Center in Harbor Gateway

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[...] a huge community push on ShareFest’s Sixth Annual Workday (that you can read about here), the Boys & Girls Club is now running programs after the center’s recent [...]