New Director Aims to “Elevate” Work of Westside Community Center
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The new director of Anderson’s Westside Community Center tells the story as if it were already a parable, one she has had time to turn over and polish. As a girl, Treca Yvette DeShields lined baby dolls in a row and instructed them to “write your alphabets, say your ABCs,” playing school in a house where, she now realizes, she was rehearsing a vocation she had not yet named.
On Tuesday after, in a ceremony the board deliberately titled a “Passing of the Torch,” that private script was made public when she was formally welcomed as Westside’s new director, a role she has held since Jan. 1.
For more than three decades, Westside Community Center has been a working thesis about what a neighborhood institution can be. Under its founding director, Dr. Beatrice Thompson, the low-slung structure on West Franklin Street became a hybrid of after-school classroom, informal social-service office, and civic commons, serving a part of Anderson where “Westside” is as much shorthand for racial and economic divides as it is a quadrant on a map. The center’s programming—homework help, youth mentorship, community meetings—has earned it a reputation as “the haven on the hill,” a place where the city’s abstractions about empowerment and engagement are translated into a child sounding out a new word or a parent filling out a job application.
DeShields arrives, as the board’s announcement puts it, with “extensive experience in nonprofit leadership, mental health advocacy, youth and family services, and community engagement,” a résumé that maps neatly onto the overlapping crises that now define everyday life for many Westside families.
Her own map begins in small-town South Carolina. She describes herself as an only child in her mother’s home, “the baby” in her father’s, a configuration that left her both indulged and observant. In her recollection, the baby dolls she lined up for lessons were less a fantasy of domestic life than an early experiment in persuasion—she talked to them, carried on conversations, insisted they perform. As a teenager, she briefly flirted with an alternative narrative: skip college, go straight to work. The plan lasted a week.
“This is not what I want to do the rest of my life,” DeShields remembers thinking, before pivoting, abruptly, back toward school with the urgency of someone who feels a door closing.
The more decisive turning point came later, and it was not the sort that appears in a guidance counselor’s brochure. One weekend, home from college and not, as she puts it, “quite where I needed to be” despite a recent profession of faith, she went to an old hangout and got into a fight with another young woman. She recalls the details clinically: a turtleneck shirt, a cut on her hand she assumed would require a simple stitch, a sudden collapse in the hospital. When she fell, she tipped to her left, revealing that her entire right side had been opened up; she had been cut nine times, seven of the wounds deep enough that “had I been cut a hair deeper, I would have lost my life.” On the gurney, she says, she experienced what she describes as an out-of-body encounter with God and heard an ultimatum: decide, today, what you are going to do.
If this sounds like the sort of stark conversion narrative common in Black church memoirs, DeShields treats it less as melodrama than as an administrative deadline.
“I promised him that day that I would serve him till I die,” she said, and within a few years the promise had taken organizational form. In Clinton, South Carolina, where she settled into church life, she started a youth group called Save Our Youth, building it into a 100-voice gospel choir that doubled as a liberal-arts collective. The teenagers rehearsed music but also staged plays and other performances, traveling to churches and events across South Carolina and neighboring states, sometimes opening for Shirley Caesar, the gospel legend whose name still functions as a kind of shorthand for a certain style of ecstatic yet precise performance.
The precocity of this operation is something she seems to appreciate more fully in retrospect. “I have parents now, and we sit back and look,” she says. “I was only 17 years old.” Because she had graduated high school early—her birthday is in October—she was legally an adolescent but practically a tour manager, arranging buses and hotel rooms, fielding questions from adults who inexplicably listened to her.
She invokes these logistics with a kind of retrospective wonder—How was I able to get a bus? How was I able to get hotel rooms at 17? —but also with the dawning recognition that this was, as she puts it, “the leader in the making.” The pattern is familiar to anyone who has spent time in Southern churches: a teenager given the keys to a ministry, learning governance on the fly.
By the time Anderson County Council honored her in 2025 for “35 years of ministry, mentorship, and tireless advocacy for the youth and families” of the region, that early experiment had become a career. She founded Love Zone Ministries and The Zone Services Inc., a multicultural community-service center whose mission statement reads like a condensed version of contemporary social-work jargon: prevention, outreach, wellness, leadership development, family strengthening. Her programs moved in and out of schools, churches, and community centers across South Carolina, occupying the same kinds of spaces that Westside now offers: multipurpose rooms where a counseling session might share a wall with a basketball game, and where a flyer about trauma-informed practice might sit next to a sign-up sheet for a college tour.
In Anderson, the word “Westside” carries its own load of history. It evokes a cluster of schools and voting precincts, but also a set of long-running conversations about race, industry, and neglect. The community center, perched on a hill at 1100 West Franklin Street, has long tried to serve as a counter-narrative—a “haven,” as its website puts it, where residents can come for tutoring, summer programs, and the less measurable comfort of being recognized by name. Under Thompson, the strategy was to make the building porous: invite in partners, volunteers, and organizations, train teenagers not only to receive help but to provide it, and, in doing so, complicate the idea of who, exactly, counts as a client.
The ceremony on Tuesday attempted to stage continuity rather than rupture. The board, in its public statement, paired “legacy” with “confidence,” expressing gratitude for Thompson’s “service, excellence, and deep community roots” while affirming its trust in DeShields to “carry the torch forward.” Residents and local officials gathered in what was billed as “A Moment of Black History Carried Forward,” a Black History Month program that used the leadership transition as an occasion to narrate Westside itself as part of a longer Black institutional history in Anderson. There were refreshments, testimonies, and the kind of lightly formalized blessing that marks many Southern civic rites.
For all the ceremonial language, the practical questions facing DeShields are concrete. The boundaries between school, clinic, and community center have blurred; children arrive with needs that do not fit neatly into a single program category. Her background in mental-health advocacy suggests that Westside may lean further into counseling and trauma-informed care, embedding those practices into settings once devoted primarily to homework help and recreation. Her experience in leadership development and family-strengthening initiatives points toward programs that treat teenagers not simply as recipients of services but as emerging staff, board members, and civic actors—the same logic that once allowed a 17-year-old choir director in Clinton to book buses and hotel rooms.
In her interview with The. Anderson Observer, she tends to return to that early ultimatum on a hospital table, the sense that she was, quite literally, cut into purpose. Yet the work ahead of her at Westside is less about personal destiny than about institutional stewardship: budgets to balance, grants to pursue, thresholds to keep open. The board’s bet is that the skills required to navigate those systems—the acronyms, the audits, the meetings downtown—are not incompatible with the ones required to know which grandmother to call when a teenager stops showing up for tutoring. If they are right, the haven on the hill will continue, as it has for three decades, to convert the abstract nouns of press releases—education, empowerment, engagement—back into daily verbs, carried out by people who remember what it is to stand, briefly, on the edge of another life and choose this one instead.
