Westside Community Center to Pass the Leadership Torch at Tuesday Event
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The new director of the Westside Community Center won’t need much prepping to get to work. Dr. Treca Yvette DeShields has been involved in the community for some time, and is ready to fill some big shoes as she followers the organization’s founder who retired last year.
For more than three decades, Westside has been shaped by the presence of one woman, Dr. Beatrice Thompson, whose tenure as director began when the neighborhood, and the country, were having a very different conversation about what counted as a “community center.” She arrived at a time when such places were still often imagined as gymnasiums with side rooms, and proceeded to turn Westside into something more complicated: a hybrid of school, informal social-service agency, and civic commons, with after-school tutoring in one room and quiet consolations in another.
The board’s announcement reminded the community of Thompson’s 30 years of “transformational leadership,” marked by an “unwavering commitment to education, youth development, and community empowerment.”
The new leader is a social worker with a doctorate, a résumé full of acronyms, and a biography that loops through small-town South Carolina and back again. Her name is Dr. Treca DeShields, MSW, and though she has been at the helm since Jan. 1, her official introduction to the community is set at an event at Westside Community Center Tuesday from 4-6 p.m., with a formal “Passing of the Torch Ceremony” to bless the exchange.
The phrase “passing of the torch,” chosen by the board for the event, is unusually apt. Thompson is not being nudged aside; she is being staged—gently, publicly—as someone whose work has created a legacy that must be carried. The board’s statement is explicit about this: “On behalf of the Board of Directors, we are deeply grateful for the extraordinary leadership of Dr. Beatrice Thompson; her legacy is one of service, excellence, and deep community roots. As we honor her contributions, we are equally confident in the leadership of Dr. Treca DeShields as she carries the torch forward.”
If Thompson’s leadership was grounded in the rhythms of a particular place—the Westside of Anderson—DeShields’s has been shaped by a network of institutions and acronyms that make up the contemporary nonprofit world. She is the founder of The Zone Services Inc., a small organization that sounds, in its mission, like a field manual for twenty-first-century social work: prevention, outreach, wellness, leadership development, family strengthening. The work has taken her, and her programs, across South Carolina, moving in and out of schools, churches, and community centers that resemble Westside in their architecture if not always in their history.
The board’s announcement, thinner on narrative than on credentials, notes that she brings “extensive experience in nonprofit leadership, mental health advocacy, youth and family services, and community engagement.” These are, in one sense, broad categories; in another, they are a map of the overlapping crises that now define much of everyday life in places like Anderson County. A community center in 2026 is not simply contending with truancy or idle afternoons. It is dealing, often indirectly, with depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, eviction, food insecurity, and the slow erosion of informal supports that once came from extended family and long-term employment.
DeShields’s own biography is, like many Southern stories, rooted in a smaller town down the road. She was born and raised in Clinton, South Carolina, to the late Mary Ellen DeShields and Thomas Glenn, and spent “many hours and a lot of energy” on that town’s needs before Anderson came calling. The press material cuts off just as it begins to describe her time at Clinton High School and her path into social work, but the outline is familiar: early involvement in church or civic groups; college; graduate work culminating in a Master of Social Work; and, eventually, a decision to build an organization rather than simply work for one.
When asked about the transition, DeShields’s quoted response is both dutiful and revealing. “I am honored to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Thompson and humbled by the trust placed in me by the Board,” she said. “Westside Community Center has a powerful legacy, and I look forward to building upon that foundation while expanding opportunities that meet the evolving needs of our community.” The statement, like most such quotes, aims to reassure: she recognizes the past, she believes in the present, and she is aware that the “needs of our community” are not static. Embedded in that phrase “evolving needs” is an acknowledgment of the last decade’s churn—opioid epidemics, pandemic disruptions, shifting school policies, the digitization of both work and loneliness.
In Anderson, the word “Westside” does a lot of work. It describes a geographic quadrant, a set of schools, a voting base, and, depending on who is speaking, a shorthand for the city’s racial and economic divides. The community center sits inside that thicket of meanings, absorbing what it can. Thompson’s approach, over thirty years, was to make the building porous to the rest of the county, inviting in partners and volunteers, and training generations of teenagers to regard it as a place where they might both receive and provide help.
The question facing DeShields is not whether to continue that work—her appointment suggests that the board expects continuity—but how to revise it for an era in which the boundaries between school, clinic, and community center are blurrier than ever. Her background in mental health advocacy hints at one direction: the integration of counseling and trauma-informed practice into settings that once focused primarily on homework help and basketball. Her experience in leadership development and “family strengthening” suggests another: programs that treat young people not only as clients but as future staff, board members, and civic actors.
The coming “Passing of the Torch Ceremony” will be, on its surface, a small event, with speeches, framed certificates, and, likely, a buffet of catered food in aluminum pans. But it will also be an opportunity for the city to measure, if only briefly, the distance between what Westside was when Thompson began and what it will need to be as DeShields takes over.
The board’s announcement reads like an attempt to compress that distance into a single sentence, pairing “legacy” with “confidence,” “service” with “innovation.” In choosing a director whose life has moved between the small town of Clinton and the broader circuits of South Carolina’s nonprofit sector, Westside is betting that the skills required to navigate grant cycles and program audits are not incompatible with the ones required to know which grandmother to call when a teenager stops showing up.
If the bet pays off, the building on the Westside will continue to function as it has for three decades: as an unglamorous but essential piece of local infrastructure, where the abstract nouns of a press release—education, empowerment, engagement—are translated back into something more concrete: a child learning to read, a parent filling out a job application, a room full of neighbors deciding, together, what they want their part of Anderson to become.
