The Brownsville Community Center on DeSoto Street in Pensacola Wednesday, July 22, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Studer Community Institute)

It’s a chance for Brownsville to speak for its future.

On Feb. 9, Escambia County Commissioners Doug Underhill and Lumon May will host a joint town hall meeting to talk about how the Brownsville Community Center could best serve the folks who live near it.

The center at 3200 W. DeSoto St. is in line for some much needed renovation work. There is $1.8 million in local option sales tax funds are in place for work on the building, which was for many years part of Brownsville Assembly of God Church.

The necessary repairs and renovations are estimated to cost about $1.3 million. Architectural firm, Quina Grundhoefer Architects is on board for the project. Construction documents are expected to be completed in early March, says Joy Tsubooka, Escambia County community and media relations division manager.

The project will go out for bid, with it being awarded to a general contractor from board approval in mid-April. The project is expected to be completed in January of 2017, Tsubooka says.

In December, commissioners heard proposals for renovations, with options for either an addition or a new building that could be used for a library/media center or a child-care center. Building an addition would bring the project cost to about $2.3 million. Building a new building would bring the total to about $3 million.

The soon-to-be renovated Brownsville Community Center will be near some of the deepest pockets of poverty in the Pensacola metro area.

Education and child care are two crucial needs in the community the center would serve. It sits in the Census tract that makes it the center of the deepest concentration of poverty in the Pensacola area, as outlined in the Studer Community Institute's "Pockets of Poverty" mapping project.

The median income in the five tracts that include the center and its surrounding neighborhoods is $22,394.

There are 812 children ages 4 and under in that area, according to Census data.

C.A. Weis and Oakcrest elementary schools serve that neighborhood, schools that serve parents and students who struggle with the impact that poverty has on a child’s educational future. Efforts at both of those schools to reach into the community to build bridges between parents and schools, but they have a long row to hoe.

What becomes of Brownsville Community Center can be an important complement to efforts under way, including the Children’s Home Society’s Community School effort at Weis and others.

But the community has to have its say.

Ideas for the proposed renovation may include workforce training, education, health, performing arts, senior citizens programs, youth development and more.

Few things are sadder than community improvement that begins with hope and fanfare and dies in miscommunication and mistrust.

That is a pitfall brought to vivid life by Washington Post writer Dale Russakoff in “The Prize.” Russakoff details the way a great, big idea — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to improve Newark, N.J., public schools — that dissolved with precious little to show for it.

Many things ended up working against the ambitious and headline-grabbing effort to reform a city’s struggling public school system where fewer than 40 percent of the students in grades three-eight were on grade level in math and reading.

Among the biggest was that  the parents whose children attended those schools were the last to know about the effort to improve their schools.

That the folks with big wallets and big political ambitions were parachuting in, solutions already in hand, to fix things without bringing the parents into the fold early and often.

The Brownsville center can be many things. It can be anything.

But it will be nothing more than a shell if the people who live there and use it aren’t heard.