The project’s sponsor established a Community Benefits Fund of over $500,000 to support the North St. Louis Youth and Community Complex, a multi-use indoor/outdoor education and recreation facility housing academic, life skills, and enrichment programs. Borrowing from the Rec2Tech model developed in Baltimore by Digital Harbor Foundation, the facility, in partnership with PGA REACH, will provide K-12 students in low-income communities access to STEAM technology and a satellite makers’ space in addition to community programming and a golf clinic. The Community Benefits Fund will also support a collaboration between Cortex, Alcami, and St. Louis Community College to create a pathway for neighborhood residents into lab tech training programs and ultimately jobs in the life science industry.
Urban Action Community Development provided $6.1 million in NMTC allocation to 4260 Forest Park in St. Louis, a 58,000 SF commercial space that will create STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education programs designed specifically to create a pathway into science and technology for the area’s low-income residents. The Project’s anchor tenant, Alcami, is a pharmaceutical research company that will be creating over 100 new jobs and providing important analytical drug discovery and development services to the regional bioscience companies and universities. The 1st floor tenant is TechShop, an open access maker space that will serve as a critical element of the local innovation economy, lowering the barriers of production and providing entrepreneurs access to machines, tools, and knowledge. The Project will create 160 new permanent positions, of which 144 will provide a living wage plus benefits and 20% will be accessible to low-income persons (LIPs). These numbers don’t include the entrepreneurs and businesses that will be launched from TechShop, which has a targeted membership of 1,000 with an estimated 25% of memberships being small businesses.
