Why a former fraternity house in State College is being renovated into nonprofit office space
A Centre County nonprofit that provides services and resources to people in crisis will be getting a new office space next year in a unique location — a former fraternity house.
Centre Helps, currently located on South Fraser Street in downtown State College, will move into the former Alpha Chi Sigma fraternity at 406 S. Pugh St. in State College next spring.
The nonprofit has outgrown its current space and was searching for something larger to accommodate its staff, volunteers and overall needs. The new location will have a larger conference room, a room with enough desks for every volunteer on a shift, private meeting space and more.
The State College borough redevelopment authority purchased the fraternity house in 2021, with sale conditions stating the property had to be used for affordable housing and to house human service agencies that provide affordable housing, homelessness or special needs services, borough manager Tom Fountaine said during a September council meeting. But after the redevelopment authority didn’t receive any formal proposals for the rehabilitation and conversion of the fraternity house, it began to look for potential office tenants in the human services community, Fountaine said.
Centre Helps needed a “significant amount” of additional space, Fountaine said, but was on a crunched scheduled to find a space before its lease ends in April.
In October the council approved loaning the redevelopment authority $1.5 million for the rehab project at a 5% interest rate for 15 years. The rehabilitation will include LEED certification, contractor costs, and HVA equipment and installation. Weber Murphy Fox designed the rehabilitation and will solicit bids to convert the first two floors of the fraternity into office space. Centre Helps signed a several year lease for the property with the borough redevelopment authority.
There will be another project later to include affordable housing units at the property, as well, Fountaine said.
“There’s three floors. One floor would be affordable housing, two floors would be office space, and there’d be a space on the first floor where there would be an ADA-accessible housing unit so that is still a project that we’re working on,” Fountaine said at the September meeting.
What will the new space have to offer?
Centre Helps Executive Director Denise McCann said their current space has been wonderful, but the nonprofit has grown so much over the years and needs more space. The nonprofit has multiple programs, including the 24/7 hotline and emergency services program, basic needs case management and the youthful offenders program. It’s also one of 12 call centers in Pennsylvania associated with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Since the 988 program was instituted in 2022, Centre Help’s call volume has tripled.
“We’ve grown so that we have to have more people on shift, so our hotline room is full. We only have two desks and two phones set up in the hotline room,” McCann said. “But we typically, during the day, have three or four people on shift, so they’re sitting on the couch or they’re using their softphone on their computer. It’s just not an ideal situation. There’s not enough room for the amount of people we need on shift in the hotline room.”
Three times a year, they perform training for new hotline staff and the conference room doesn’t accommodate the class size either, she said.
“It’s four hours a night, twice a week for seven weeks, and we just don’t have appropriate space to do that. So they’re either crammed in there, or we have to scramble to find other space that we can use on a pretty intense basis,” she said.
After a contractor assessed the current office space, which was previously a small residential house, to see if it would be able to be renovated to fit their needs, they knew they’d need to find something new. Renting office space right in downtown State College would be too expensive for Centre Helps, but it also needed to be within walking distance of campus as all of the hotline volunteers are Penn State students.
McCann said she talked with the borough manager about potential spaces, and it all came together from there.
The new office space will be exactly what they need because McCann was able to work with the architect on the design. Gone will be the days of scrambling to find a place to hold their training sessions because they’ll have a large conference room that will be able to accommodate it.
The hotline room will be big enough to have four desks in it, and they’ll also have more private meeting spaces available. There will also be a room for staff to not only use for breaks, but to also destress and debrief after difficult calls or interactions. Yoga mats, comfortable chairs and more will be available to them.
Currently, they have their emergency food pantry split between the basement and first floor, but it will have its own dedicated area in the new space.
Plus, they’ll have a full kitchen. One of the things that excites McCann the most about the new location is having the space to really take care of her staff and volunteers.
“I’m very much a nurturing person. I love baking and cooking for people. So I can envision a day like today — a cold, winter, rainy day — having a pot of homemade soup on the stove for volunteers just to come and help themselves,” McCann said. “I do want to emphasize that the work they do is hard. They’re getting some hard calls. They’re getting calls from people who are in the act of taking their own lives or who are really struggling. And so we want to take care of the people who are doing that hard work, and I will have that space and the opportunity to do that with this new space.”
Opening it up to the community is another thing McCann is eager to do. They’ve thought about holding cooking classes like nutritional cooking on a budget, or self-care and wellness classes like yoga, and inviting their clients and the community to participate. Neither of those things could have happened at the current location due to the lack of space.
The plan is to move into the new space by March 2025, and Centre Helps will have an open house later that spring or summer to invite the community to see the office.
