Strawberry Mansion Learning Center reopens for children’s summer program post pandemic, and renovations

Children entered the Strawberry Mansion Learning Center Monday morning for its annual summer camp program for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools and businesses in 2020.

They returned to a remodeled center at 2946 W. Dauphin in Strawberry Mansion, only a few blocks from Fairmount Park.

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On Monday, the children, who ranged in age from 6 to 14, read about geography on computers and they began an introductory class in how to make their own documentary about the summer camp experience.

Kevin Upshur, director of the learning center, first opened the center in 2008, after converting it from the corner bar that his mother used to own.

While Mondays are devoted to technology instruction, Upshur said, on Tuesdays, the children will go in vans to take tennis lessons at the courts at the Miles Gray Jr. Memorial Tennis Courts at the Mander Playground.

“It kept me out of trouble, and I learned a lot.”

Upshur has applied for a grant from the Wawa Foundation Hero Award, which, if the center wins, would be used to build a state-of-the art computer lab on the learning center’s second floor.

He said people have until Wednesday, June 28, to vote for the Wawa awards.

Other organizations nominated for the Hero Award are: Love Pray Peace Veterans Residence, Philly House (formerly the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission), and Students Run Philly Style.

There will be field trips during the summer camp also, including one to Muhammad Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pa. The older counselors visited the camp earlier this month, Upshur said

Among the camp counselors at the program on Monday were Jayvon Sullivan, 16, who started going to the center’s after-school program when he was 9 years old.

Joshua Hunter, 24, a junior board member, who works for Amazon as a delivery driver, started attending Upshur’s program when he was 10.

Hunter said he used to live across the street from the center and came there every day. “It was a safe place for me. It kept me out of trouble, and I learned a lot.”

As a boy attending the center, Hunter said, he went on field trips to see the Washington Monument in D.C. and the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem where Malcolm X was speaking when he was assassinated.

“You have a lot of kids out here who never experienced anything outside of their house,” Hunter said. “My parents never took me to New York, Washington, D.C., or Pittsburgh,” he said.

“We want the children to see that this program came from people who grew up in these same blocks.”

There was a void in this community before the learning center opened, said Eric Rahman Lawton, who is a member of the center’s board of directors.

Lawton, 60, who was seated in a tented area outside the center on Monday, said he has known Upshur, 62, since they were both students at Strawberry Mansion High School.

“With the violence in the city of Philadelphia, we have to take a united stand and be the people these children can look up to,” Lawton said. He said the men who contribute and support the center often have blue-collar jobs working in the juvenile justice system, or as mail carriers, or truck drivers.

“We want the children to see that this program came from people who grew up in these same blocks and that we care about them,” Lawton said.