If you are a parent and have brought your children to the Bayshore Town Center recently, you may have noticed a large and wheeled structure with towels piled inside it near the center’s fountains.
You may also have noticed that a person at this structure was willing to loan you a towel at no charge to use in case your children decided that getting wet in the fountains would be fun.
Finally, you may have seen on this structure a sign saying that this “towel trolley” — officially the Summer Towel Kiosk Program — was provided by the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
What you may not have known before reading this article is that this service is just one item in a new and possibly uncommon partnership between the JCC and the Bayshore Town Center.
“If we’re not the only, there must be very few” such institutions “attempting any kind of partnership like this,” said Mark Shapiro, executive director of the JCC, in a telephone interview July 22.
The two organizations this past June signed an agreement to work together for three years.
They began joint activities this summer with a JCC Summer Kickoff Carnival on June 16 that Shapiro said about 1,000 people attended. They also held a “baby ballet” class on June 23; and a series of Sunday morning “In Fuse” workouts for adults that will conclude on Aug. 22.
The summer projects will continue in August with JCC Mini Maccabi Games for children ages 3 to 7 on Wednesday, Aug. 18; and climax with a JCC End of Summer Carnival on Wednesday, Aug. 25.
Also on that day is scheduled the opening of J•Shore, an indoor space near the mall’s food court and Playshore area. The JCC will be using this space for a wide range of functions, some of them not yet determined.
Indeed, said Shapiro, “The most exciting thing about this is that we don’t know what it is going to be yet. The goal is to talk to the community and find out what it wants and meet its needs.”
However, he said that some likely uses of the space will be to hold mini-classes, drop-in art projects, and outreach efforts for health issues; to be the base for a new mall exercise walkers program called “J•Walkers”; and generally to “educate the community about what the JCC has to offer,” said Shapiro. Dana Emold was recently appointed program manager of J•Shore.
The process leading to this collaboration began about a year-and-a-half ago, when Carl Mueller, head of the public relations firm Mueller Communications and a member of the board of Jewish Family Services, introduced Shapiro to Chris Jaeger, general manager of the Bayshore Town Center.
“Carl just felt that Mark and I should meet and that we may share some things in common, being both in business administration and working close by” each other, said Jaeger in a telephone interview on July 26.
They began meeting regularly and discussing how they could work together.
The JCC has “a large membership base that also accesses Bayshore on a regular basis,” said Jaeger. “They have a way for us to communicate” about the shopping center.
“Also, from a programming standpoint, Bayshore is different from the traditional shopping center,” Jaeger continued. “We invest in community-based programs and hold events that cater to families, kids, senior citizens, because people of all ages and all walks of life access Bayshore.”
And the JCC “wanted to be associated with the Bayshore brand because we believe it is a premier brand in the city of Milwaukee,” said Shapiro. “We were pleased to find out that the Bayshore Town Center felt the same way about the JCC.”
For more information about this summer’s JCC-Bayshore Town Center events, visit the JCC Web site, www.jccmilwaukee.com.
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