Marlene Nava Robles steered her gray minivan into the parking lot and reminded her passengers to wave to the large blue hummingbirds painted on the outside of the Esperanza Community Center at Dobie. Marlene’s greeting — “Hello, birds,” the daily signal that the short morning commute is over — set off the kind of wiggle-fest that requires a mom’s quick action.
First, she helped her 81-year-old mother, Rosa, unfasten her seat belt and gently guided her to the nearby sidewalk. Next, Marlene unbuckled four car seats and, one by one, set her 23-month-old quadruplets onto the pavement.
“Uno, dos. Uno, dos,” mother and grandmother sang as Luis, Luka, Marlene, and Martin tried to step to the rhythm of their voices. Once inside the childcare center Marlene got right to work: Four children to sign in. Four diapers to change. Four sets of little hands to wash.
After a flurry of goodbye kisses, Marlene held her mother’s hand as they walked down a long hallway to Esperanza’s activity center for senior citizens. Marlene hovered over Rosa as she signed herself in and joined a table with other seniors enjoying toast and juice.
Only then did Marlene look at her phone and exhale. It was 9 a.m. and she wouldn’t be late for her ESL class at Dallas College’s nearby Richland campus.
Considering her responsibilities at home, Marlene, 41, never thought it would be possible to resume her education. “Leaving the children here and knowing my mother is happy gives me a chance to learn English, something that will help my family,” she says through an interpreter.
Fulfilling dreams like Marlene’s is the mission of this fledgling community center, located in the Esperanza neighborhood immediately west of Central Expressway near the border of Dallas and Richardson. About 12,000 people live here, a third of them children. Eighty percent of households scrape by on an annual income of no more than $50,000; a third live on less than $27,750 a year.
For more than a decade, Jaynie Schultz, first as an appointee to the City Plan Commission and then as a City Council member, looked for ways to bring health, educational, and social services to Esperanza. In 2023, she found an ally in newly-elected Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman. When Richardson Independent School District trustees voted the next year to close Esperanza’s Dobie Pre-Kindergarten School, Dallas County proposed a second life for the building — as a centralized neighborhood hub for resources that residents say are most needed in their community.
The Esperanza Community Center at Dobie isn’t a new model but rather has learned from similar local strategies that offer diverse services under one roof. For instance, southeast Dallas’ Jubilee Park, planted almost 30 years ago; Bachman Lake Together Family Center, which this year celebrated its 10-year anniversary; and For Oak Cliff, which moved into a former YMCA building during the pandemic.
Esperanza marks the first time county government has led the way in establishing a services-focused community center. Richardson ISD agreed to lease the building for 30 years at a cost of $10 total, and Sommerman allocated $5 million in federal pandemic relief funds to redevelop the building. The county also arranged for a nonprofit entity, the Esperanza Community Center Local Government Corporation, to manage the facility’s development and operation.
The help each agency provides is free to families who qualify under federal income guidelines. Since December, about half a dozen services have opened; others are scheduled for later this year and next.
“It’s ‘womb to tomb’ help,” Sommerman says. “This center is providing services to an incredibly underserved community and one where many households are multigenerational.”
Last Thursday, almost 300 neighborhood advocates, service providers, and government officials swarmed the former Dobie campus for the community center’s official grand opening. Now the partner agencies want to fill the halls each day with neighbors in need of services.
The childcare, senior citizen, and WIC (women, infant, and children) facilities, the three open the longest, still have space for more participants. The Esperanza Community Market, a food bank operated by Crossroads Community Services, began its soft opening late last week. Dallas College expects to begin its programs next month. A Parkland medical clinic, currently a hard-hat construction zone, is scheduled to open in early 2027.
“The real magic is still to come,” says Tori Mannes, president and CEO of the ChildCareGroup, whose centers include the one where Marlene drops off her quads each day. Once word spreads about Esperanza and the agencies are all operating at full strength, Mannes says, “a visit here can help a family in countless ways and with needs they didn’t even realize they could get help with.”
Rivaling Esperanza’s youngest clients when it comes to fun and enthusiasm are the 20 adults who regularly show up at the Dallas County Health and Human Services senior center. Like Marlene’s mother, these neighborhood residents sometimes don’t share the same language, but each day they share laughter, songs, and dance moves.
“The respect the senior center treats older adults with leads me to never want to miss a day,” Rosa says through an interpreter. Her favorite activity is the strength-building chair exercises. “I can’t do what I once could, but I do whatever I can,” she says. “I have to keep up with those babies.”
On a recent day, the county van that transports seniors between their homes and the community center took those who wanted to shop to a nearby store. Lunch back at the center followed, as did praise for the Cajun chicken, whole kernel corn, broccoli, carrots, fresh oranges, and milk.
Arely Lopez, the senior center manager, says immunizations, health screenings, field trips, and hot lunches are popular, but the biggest draw is the chance to socialize. “Especially for those who live alone,” she says, “they see it as a family, a great opportunity to build a relationship and basically have more connection.”
Daniel, a retired U.S. Marine Corps corporal who introduced himself only by his first name, relishes his role as class helper. Daniel was the first to lend a hand when another senior had difficulty maneuvering their walker or struggled to board the van. He also made sure he and the other shoppers purchased a variety of candy to hand out at the ChildCareGroup’s upcoming fall parade.
Before another veteran told him about the senior center, Daniel says he was always at home and bored, staying busy by cleaning and folding clothes. “I’m Native [American] and this is good medicine,” he says. “When I started coming here, it just opened my eyes to a new perspective.”
Across the hallway, Renae Lesley, with the nonprofit Big Thought, hopes to soon see growth in her Thriving Minds after-school program for elementary-age children. At 3 p.m., she began her daily half-mile walk to RISD Academy to escort a handful of students to her Esperanza classroom.
After snacking on fresh cucumber and carrot slices, the young girls were eager to finish their construction-paper butterflies. While they decorated the wings with scraps in contrasting colors, they debated whether Skeleton Bride or Ghostface from the “Scream” series was the better Halloween costume.
Despite the many promotional flyers Lesley distributed throughout schools, churches, and the broader Esperanza neighborhood, she only has five students enrolled in this first semester of the Thriving Minds program. The lack of transportation options to get kids from area campuses to the community center has been one of the biggest hurdles. The goal in August was to fill one classroom with 25 participants before opening a second. “We thought it was going to be booming, and here we are limping along,” Lesley says.
Lesley is passionate about Thriving Minds succeeding at Esperanza, especially after her conversation last month with a grandfather from the neighborhood. He was desperate to find after-school care for his elementary-age granddaughter. After an eviction earlier this year, the family had barely settled into a new apartment when the girl’s mother disappeared. “He told me, ‘I just got a new job and if I can’t be there, I’ll lose it and our new apartment too,’” Lesley says.
“How can we not be here for families like that?” she says.
Another provider trying to get the word out to the surrounding neighborhoods is Metrocare, which began providing mental health services here last February.
In between her sessions, therapist Erika Barraza says the goal is for individuals and families to receive professional care closer to home. “There’s not enough people serving the Hispanic population, and that’s a big reason we are here,” Barraza says.
Signs at all four corners of the campus point to the City of Dallas WIC office at Esperanza, the community center’s first tenant and by far its most frequented. Open since last December, this WIC outpost provides services such as nutrition classes, breastfeeding support, immunizations, and health screenings to about 750 clients each month. Marlene occasionally stops here to pick up the fruits, vegetables, and milk also available through the federal supplemental nutrition program.
Kimberly Borden, whose 2-year-old son, Josiah, is also in the ChildCareGroup Esperanza Center, takes advantage of the agency’s parenting skills classes and parent cafe. Borden, a mother of three boys who is pregnant with her fourth, says, “Even when we’re already parents, we’re always a new parent to each child.”
Although the public is welcome to peek in on many activities inside Esperanza, security is understandably tight at the ChildCareGroup center, which Marlene, Kimberly, and dozens of other parents have entrusted with their children.
ChildCareGroup’s Early Head Start services at Esperanza span the prenatal months through toddler years. Its Head Start program, in partnership with Richardson ISD, covers 3- and 4-year-olds. There is no cost to any family whose income qualifies them for the programs, which include meals and longer hours of care for parents who need that flexibility. More than 40 children are currently enrolled; about 30 spots remain available.
In one classroom, a teacher wrapped a crying preschooler in a hug that lasted five minutes. Things were rough at home the night before, which made morning drop-off more stressful for the child. In the next room, a teacher taught kids the chant “Cha, Cha, Chachacha” and clapped as the children echoed the words using the same beat. In the back of the room, a mother and father whose two daughters were new to the class sat and observed.
In the hallway, toddlers marched to the playground as they sang “The Ants Go Marching One by One.” Attached to the wall above their heads were the words “I LOVE BOOKS” alongside a grinning rainbow-colored caterpillar. Each of the insect’s craft-paper body segments contained the name of a story a parent has read this semester to their children.
Viry Nieto, ChildCareGroup’s center manager, was delighted to hear that the Esperanza seniors planned to attend the kids’ fall festival parade. The children’s parents will also be on hand, so Nieto has invited all the agencies to come and share information about the services they provide.
Mannes, the ChildCareGroup CEO, expects referrals among the agencies to grow as each provider becomes better acquainted with families using their services. She imagines a day, not so long from now, when a Dallas College instructor at Esperanza hears about a student’s food insecurity and refers them to Crossroads Community Services. “That kind of mindset can have a ripple effect across every employee of every service provider here,” Mannes says.
The solutions Marlene has found inside this community center illustrate why Schultz and Sommerman never wavered in their commitment to open the Esperanza Community Center at Dobie.
“When as a community we can solve problems for children and families and reduce barriers for participation, these families can thrive,” Mannes says. “This community center is creating the conditions where these families can get everything that they need to enhance their life and to achieve their dreams.”
By the time Marlene arrived last Thursday afternoon to pick up her mother and children, most of the decorations from the morning’s grand opening had been stored away and the building’s halls were quiet.
Rosa waited in the car while Marlene scooped up Luis, Luka, Marlene, and Martin from their classrooms. “Yes, it’s crazy to have four little ones, but they are God’s plan,” she says, trying out a little of her English.
She adds that today’s challenges are nothing compared to the two months the quads spent in the Parkland Neonatal Intensive Care Unit after they were born at 31 weeks. And Marlene isn’t new to multiple births; she already has 14-year-old twin boys.
“My older ones are in a good school and my baby ones are learning here and my mother is happy here,” she says. “We are very thankful for all of this.”
Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior staff writer of The Lab Report. sharon@labreportdallas.com. You can read more of her work here.
