The Hope Center and many other organizations owe a lot to Cecil Dunn | Opinion

Cecil Dunn died recently. His contributions to this community, including the Hope Center, live on.

The Hope Center hired Cecil in 1995 to be its new executive director. The center occupied one building, the emergency shelter. On a typical night, it housed around 140 homeless men in a facility with 116 beds.

During Cecil’s 24 years as executive director the Hope Center built seven new facilities, including a recovery center for men, a recovery center for women, a permanent housing facility for men in recovery, a permanent housing facility for women in recovery, a new free-standing cafeteria, a transitional housing facility, and the Don Ball Campus Center featuring expanded activity and office space on the first floor and affordable permanent housing on the second and third floors.

Also, during that time the Hope Center took over the management and administrative functions at One Parent Scholar House. That facility has 80 apartments of affordable permanent housing, an on-site child development center, and a supportive staff. It provides single parents the opportunity to seek an education, an education that would otherwise be beyond their reach.

When Cecil completed his time as executive director, the Hope Center, including One Parent Scholar House, typically provided more than 800 men, women, and children with a safe place to sleep at night.

One of the first undertakings Cecil devoted himself to was to establish a strong substance abuse program. After consulting with a number of people, Cecil decided he wanted to take a hard look at a recovery center in Louisville, The Healing Place. Cecil had every employee at the Hope Center make a day-long visit to The Healing Place one van load at a time. Then he undertook to use The Healing Place as the model for what became the Hope Center’s own recovery program. It went into full operation in August 1996 and has been held in high regard by the recovery community ever since.

One of the strengths of this recovery program is that it is peer-driven. The clients themselves play a large role in welcoming new clients, supporting them as they work their way through the program, and helping them stay on track when they falter.

Don Ball was deeply involved with the Hope Center throughout most of Cecil’s tenure. (He was also devoted to One Parent Scholar House and urged the Hope Center to take over responsibility for it.) Cecil felt he and Don shared a sense of kinship because they had grown up in similar circumstances. Together they drove the transformation of the Hope Center from that single shelter to the broad-based multidisciplinary organization it is today.

When Don was chairman of Kentucky Housing Corporation, an organization Cecil had worked with for years, the two of them developed a proposal to build more centers that would combine in one facility affordable housing for the clients along with recovery services on the model of the Hope Center and The Healing Place. Today there are 18 of these recovery centers across the state. On a typical day more than 2000 clients occupy these centers while working on their recovery.

And here is perhaps the most remarkable thing about this partnership: Don Ball was a rock-ribbed Republican, and Cecil Dunn was a yellow dog Democrat. Two men with divergent views were determined to do good for people who were in need and in pain. They saw the need and together did something about it. This seems quaint in this age of personal insults and manufactured outrage.

Cecil Dunn was a man of faith, and he lived that faith. He was a man of compassion, and he put that compassion to work. He was a man who recognized problems, and he solved them. He was a leader, and he led.

Walter May assisted Cecil Dunn for all of Cecil’s 24-year tenure as executive director of the Hope Center.