The LDS Church is allowing some of its often-empty meetinghouses to be used as ‘community learning centers’

Provo • Helaman Pineda arrived in Provo from Mexico about eight years ago, and though he only spoke Spanish, he said he didn’t have a hard time communicating or finding work in the predominantly Latter-day Saint city.

That’s because, along with fellow immigrants, plenty of former missionaries with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spoke Spanish, he realized, learned during their years away proselytizing. And whether they worked as cashiers at stores, or became his HVAC clients, many were eager to keep up the practice.

Though he got by, he still occasionally encountered people who couldn’t understand him, he said. That disconnect pushed him to learn English to bridge that final gap.

Last January, he decided to enroll in the free classes he had seen advertised at his Latter-day Saint church in Provo’s Pioneer Park district — one of two meetinghouses in the city that transform each week from religious worship spaces to community resource centers (and back again) to host classes like the one Pineda attended.

Just over a year later, Pineda has advanced to the highest level “English as a second language” course offered through the program, and he’s since started his own heating and cooling systems business. He said he found community in these classes, part of the MyHometown Utah program, and advancing his English skills has changed his life.

“The English has helped me, I think, like 80%, because I had the knowledge with my job, but,” he said, “I need to improve my communication with the customers.”

The MyHometown program started in 2020 in West Valley City and has since spread to 11 other neighborhoods in West Valley City, Provo, Ogden and Salt Lake City.

At participating Latter-day Saint meetinghouses, community members like Pineda can enroll in classes on English, basic computing, sewing, piano and children’s literacy, plus seminars on immigration. The program also hosts days of service in which volunteers can help homeowners come into compliance with city code or otherwise freshen up their houses with a new coat of paint or a repaired fence.

Last year, more than 1,000 volunteers taught 2,650 people and completed 1,302 community service projects, said Jerry Craven, a spokesperson with MyHometown.

The program is a collaboration between its partner municipalities, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, area businesses, and other religious organizations, and aims to revitalize “struggling” neighborhoods and instill “a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of friendship.”

By the end of this year, Craven expects to expand to four more neighborhoods and hopes to start programs in other cities.

“A lot of times, people come into these neighborhoods, and they feel, ‘Gosh, nobody knows me. I’m here on my by myself; I’m an immigrant, or I’m from another city or another town,’ and they become very closed off,” Craven said, “and through MyHometown, all of a sudden, they find there’s a lot of other people like them.”

How the program started

Craig Thomas, director of West Valley City’s neighborhood services, said the program was born out of conversations between a city staffer with ties to the church and residents who had concerns about their neighborhoods.

They saw not enough people sticking around long term, and too many homes with signs of neglect, he said. And they wondered how they might entice residents to reinvest in their neighborhoods, giving people a reason to stay.

Thomas said the church was an obvious partner, because it had “capacity in two areas” — large, sometimes vacant, meetinghouses and a “massive pool of members looking for volunteer opportunities.”

The program opened with a launch party in West Valley City in February 2020. Then classes started.

But, “unfortunately,” Thomas said laughing, this was 2020.

“We had the launch, then we had the earthquake, and then we had the pandemic,” Thomas said. “So it was kind of like, panic, panic. What do we do?”

Volunteers persevered, keeping the spirit of the program alive with neighborly gestures small and grand — from painted rock scavenger hunts to a parade — as residents quarantined amid the early stages of the pandemic.

When it was safer to gather again, the program got back on track, Thomas said. And it’s seemed to work.

“They’ve pretty much had waitlists for some of their classes since they opened their doors,” Thomas said.

Craven said some cities have since seen a reduction in code enforcement violations. He’s heard anecdotes of people finally meeting neighbors they’ve lived next to for years.

And while Craven expects the program to expand before year’s end (and in the years afterward), there is a problem in these struggling neighborhoods that the church doesn’t have an answer to yet: homelessness.

Craven said “we’re always looking for new opportunities,” but “the homelessness issue is something that we’ve just said, ‘We can’t tackle that one right now.’”

In the future? Maybe, he said, but it would likely take a new sort of initiative.

MyHometown in action

On a Tuesday evening in February, as cold gusts of wind blew a winter storm into Provo, the Pioneer Park neighborhood’s namesake park was virtually empty. The parking lot two blocks away, however, at the Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, was full of cars.

Signs hung on the building’s brick facade or on A-frame sandwich boards, signaling to community members that inside the church, there was something a little less churchy going on. Inside, stacks of bagels were up for grabs, and volunteers behind a plastic table greeted students and told them where to go.

Notes sounded as students tinkered on pianos, set up in five stations around the meetinghouse, as others trekked upstairs to the 10 classrooms, where they learned either English or basic computing. On that level, closets store instructional items between classes. The largest, most advanced English class — which Pineda is in — met downstairs in the high council room.

At this center, in one of Provo’s most racially and economically diverse areas, ESL classes are the most popular, said Greg Baum, who until last month directed the Pioneer Park community center with his wife, Valynn.

The meetinghouse had always been “well-used” by Latter-day Saints on Sundays, and for other meetings during the week, Valynn Baum said. Yet, there were times when it sat virtually empty. Now, that’s never the case when classes meet.

“It’s incredible,” Greg Baum said, sharing a photo from outside the building that evening, which showed cars “lining the street, and cars as far as you can see.”

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