– Florence and Bernie Hamling outright donating the building and grounds of 287 – 289 Main Street to the Center.
– David and Eve Smith, along with volunteers from their church community, hosting a free community meal and food distribution program twice weekly.
– Becka Lydick offering three mornings and afternoons each week of before and after school childcare.
– The talented and gallant Catskill Community Radio crew putting together our fabulous Cabaradio show, which celebrates the people and the personalities of our region, four times per year. They also help maintain a 24/7 broadcast schedule of internet radio programming at www.catskillradio.org.
– Glenn Baker and the rest of the Big Indian Native American Cultural Center hosting monthly Native American Gatherings that are open and welcoming to all.
– Our dedicated Board of Directors who show up to meetings with an attitude of mutual respect and their own personal commitments to furthering the Center’s mission and serving the needs of this community.
– Inspiring people like Polly Vos who shows up every Saturday morning with a delicious home baked dish to put on the pot of coffee and welcome anyone in who wishes to enjoy it.
– All the fine ladies of the Pine Hill Social Circle who meet and chat and eat and laugh their asses off every Wednesday afternoon.
– Jaime DeForest throwing her beautiful clay bowls and organizing an Annual Chili Festival in November.
– The countless local writers, musicians, historians and personalities who have shared their time and talents on our stage or given presentations here.
– All the people who have been showing up to help plan for the future of our little Main Street.
– Sara Ampel and now Lee Potter-Passus from the Mental Health Association (MHA) of Ulster County showing up on Wednesday afternoons to provide assistance and referral services to those who may need them.
– All the people and organizations who have responded to our fund drives, grant requests, membership drives, and who have given a little of their time, talent and money in support of our programs.

The list goes on. As Director of the Center I can take little credit for this. I can facilitate, write the bills and grants and so forth, but it is you who must own this place; it is you who make it work, and you are the reason we are here.

I have some visions for the future as well. Early in January I will be meeting with the Commissioner of Social Services in an effort to bring a representative from the Department here to Pine Hill once per month so people no longer need to get to Kingston to have their questions answered, to fill out certain forms and to access certain services such as Medicaid. I would also like to be able to offer access to professional counseling here at the Center, as well as to Public Health Nurses and other medical services. We have a Spanish speaking representative from MHA coming here in early January in an effort to begin feeling out and serving the needs of the growing Latino population in our area.

The Center is also kicking off a capital campaign to help raise funds to make our building more energy efficient. Late this fall we completed a few repairs to our roof, thanks in part to a grant from the Ulster Savings Foundation, and plan to begin insulating underneath it soon. We could use your help with this; it is an investment with a payoff. NYSERDA has estimated that if we do some $20,000 worth of work on the building now it could be made back in as little as six years through savings on our energy bills. Think of all that money freed up to expand our programming and to better serve this community! Think also of the resources that will be saved, such as heating oil and electricity usage. You can go to the “donate” page of this website if you’d like to make a secure on-line donation to help us with this. Please put “building fund” into your message if you’d like the money to be set aside for energy efficiency projects.

The most important point of this message is to say thank you. Thank you for your support of the Pine Hill Community Center, but even more for your care and commitment to this community, this area, these Catskills. Let’s continue to express our love for this place in positive ways, in ways that bring us together rather than divide us, in ways that uplift us rather than diminish us, in ways that are informed and visionary rather than apathetic and clinging to the status-quo, in ways that are protective of those things that we value yet progressive about creating a viable and enjoyable future. We are a community filled with so many talented, intelligent, strong-willed and energetic people; we are neighbors with decent values and a deep love for this place, a place whose winds blow clean, whose waters flow clear, where wildlife can roam unencumbered on the mountainsides, where we often encounter beauty that cuts so deep it is almost painful. These are things which most people on this planet rarely if ever come in contact with – we are overflowing with them. Let’s not put it to waste. Together we march into 2010; may the new year bring blessings to us all, and may we all make the most of our time with the resources we have available to us, which are many! Happy and healthy holidays to you all.

This new website is made possible, in part, through support from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services and Promotion Fund administered by the Dutchess County Arts Council. The Pine Hill Community Center is pleased to be a recipient of this grant, which supports capacity building projects for arts and cultural organizations throughout the County.

From the very start in 2000 the Pine Hill Community Center has had a strong focus in the arts. Here in our corner of northwestern Ulster County we have been arts pioneers. We’ve brought countless arts programs to both youth and adults, including music, dance, painting, pottery, photography, drama and writing. We were the first to organize studio tours of Shandaken artists, have showcased countless local performers as well as some international acts, and have provided opportunities for both youth and adults to learn about and develop their skills in all artistic disciplines.

You may wonder why a Community Center has devoted so much of its programming to the arts. We are here to build community, organic support networks, and to enrich the lives of those who live in and visit our area. Simply put, we have found the arts to be one of the best ways to accomplish these purposes. The arts build community by bringing people together. A small example of this is at our Upstage Community Coffeehouses, where four performers share their music to an audience in an intimate, unplugged cabaret setting. The performers all sit on stage, one performing a song, then another, in an “in the round” format. Time and again I see new relationships form not only between the musicians, but between the musicians and the audience, and the audience with the audience. Everyone is brought together in the common experience of the songs, which often create an atmosphere of intimacy and vulnerability that is not generally reached during most social occasions. This is exactly how the arts build community, inspire the formation of organic support networks, and enrich our lives.

The arts celebrate those things that we all share as humans. Whether they make us laugh, cry or cringe, the arts are mirroring the best and the worst in all of us. Because they mirror our common humanity the arts can bring us together and, when used with these intentions, create profound opportunities for healing. When we loose sight of those experiences, emotions, and reflections that make us human we begin to loose sight of each other, and when we loose sight of each other we begin to court disaster. The Center exists as both a product of, and reminder of, the power we have in not loosing sight of each other, and so we have made it our commitment to not loose sight of the arts!