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How Tenacity Perseverance and a Determined Trio Helped to Build the Brookline Senior Center

By: Leanne Cordischi


In the 1980’s many communities were creating senior centers and resource hubs for their seniors.
Ruthann Dobek, as a recent social worker grad, recognized that Brookline needed a senior center.

Her social work colleagues Sue Welpton and Helen Sampson also saw the value that a center would
bring the Brookline Community. The optimistic trio approached their boss, Arlene Stern, numerous
times about building a Senior Center for Brookline. The young women received several rounds of NOs.
Ms. Stern was concerned that it would require too much work, money and aggravation. However,
determined and armed with a frosted cake and some solid reasons why the community needed a senior
center, Ruthann and her colleagues sat down one afternoon with their boss to discuss, over bites of
cake, why the center would be such an asset in Brookline.

Click Here to read the full article and learn the role Graham Nash and Ted Kennedy Jr. played in the building of the BSC.