Calfee Community & Cultural Center

The Harmon Learning Center at Calfee will open in Fall 2024!

Help to Reopen the Doors of an Historic African American School to Serve Children from All Backgrounds

Once a school only for African American children, the Calfee Training School is being transformed into a community and cultural center that will create opportunities for all of our community’s families to thrive financially, nutritionally, educationally, and culturally. 

The first phase of the construction project, currently underway and scheduled to be complete this summer, will allow the Calfee Community and Cultural Center (CCCC) to open the Harmon Learning Center, a nurturing, stimulating, and safe environment where children ages 6 weeks to 5 years can thrive, explore, and embrace the world around them. This center is scheduled to open in Fall 2024.

The center is named for Lucy and Chauncey Harmon, Pulaski natives and Calfee Training School educators who bravely struggled for better educational opportunities for children.

With your help TODAY, we will open the Harmon Learning Center in Fall 2024

You can help us reopen this school to provide high quality play-based early childhood developmental opportunities to families across the income spectrum with your donation today. In particular, we are raising funds to support our innovative and collaboratively designed outdoor play space. 

Back in 2021, Calfee alumni, parents of young children (including children with special needs), preschool teachers, and local parks and recreation and planning professionals came together to learn about what recreational opportunities were like at the Calfee Training School. 

The stories shared were both tragic as they related to the injustice of underfunded Black schools during the Jim Crow era and inspiring as we heard of the ways Calfee students used their creativity to make up games using little to no playground equipment provided by the school system. From those discussions grew a vision for the outdoor play spaces that would take the best from this history and apply it to a vision for outdoor play at Calfee.

While Calfee children had no choice but to make up games from nothing, research now informs us that this sort of creative play is actually important for child development. While CCCC does not intend to underfund these play spaces at the Harmon Learning Center, our outdoor play spaces will be set up so as to encourage children to engage with nature and to use their creativity to learn to work with each other and play. The images below represent some of the concepts that will implemented in these play spaces. 

We can't do this without your help.

There are many ways to support building the outdoor play spaces at the Harmon Learning Center. We are so grateful to the Building Trades students and teachers at Pulaski County High School for helping us to build some of the play space equipment, like this boat which we know will inspire lots of creative play. Your donation will help us purchase supplies for the play space. We can't wait to see what we as a community will build together with our youngest children.

Any size donation helps. Anyone who makes a cumulative donation of $250 or more will be listed on our Legacy Wall! 

If you aren't sure how much you have donated to the CCCC to date, please contact Co-Executive Director Jill Williams at 540-509-0808 or jill@calfeeccc.org.

***The Harmon Learning Center is only a part of the work of the Calfee Community and Cultural Center. We invite you to learn more about our rehabilitation of the Calfee Training School and our programs at www.CalfeeCCC.org. ***