ORLANDO, Fla. — City and community leaders gathered Friday morning for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the upcoming opening of a new wellness center in an area of Downtown Orlando known as "The Communities of West Lakes."

Once it’s open later this spring, the 30,000 square-foot Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center will include a comprehensive health care center, a financial well-being center, event space and a cafe, as well as several indoor and outdoor gathering spaces. The building was designed to combat deeply rooted health care disparities in the five historically Black neighborhoods making up the West Lakes community, according to Lift Orlando, the community development organization behind the project. 

“This is just another asset for the community, another investment in the community, specific to health care,” said Terry Prather, senior adviser for Lift Orlando. “And health care’s not just about the medical side. It’s about having a place where people come together and they can thrive, both financially and [with] health care.”

Prather said during the design process that Lift Orlando envisioned Heart of West Lakes as a “community living room,” somewhere people feel comfortable to come and just hang out.

“In many communities, we have this ‘third place,’ where people can go: it's not home, and it’s not work. This community didn’t have that, but now we do,” Prather said.

Although Lift Orlando will prioritize serving residents of West Lakes, in keeping with its ongoing mission to transform that area into “an ecosystem of opportunities,” anybody will be able to come take advantage of the resources there after the Heart of West Lakes opens to the public, Prather said.

“We want to focus on the residents of West Lakes, and [zip code] 32805. Because this community has been underinvested when it comes to health care,” Prather said. “So we want to make sure that we’ve got something now that’s right in their backyard, whether [they’re] uninsured, underinsured or with insurance.”

Research from Harvard University and the U.S. Census Bureau has shown that the neighborhoods where we grew up as children can shape our life outcomes in adulthood. Much of Lift Orlando’s work is a response to that correlation — including Pendana at West Lakes, an intentionally mixed-income residential community. 

“In some ways, that’s what the whole neighborhood investment of Lift Orlando is trying to do: How do you create an ecosystem where generational cycles of prosperity are just what’ll happen if you live here?” Lift Orlando President Eddy Moratin previously told Spectrum News.

At Friday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, longtime area resident Shirley Richardson Bradley expressed her excitement about the new holistic wellness center. Richardson Bradley said she and her late husband built their home in Clear Lakes in 1963, before integration. 

Remembering the formerly deteriorated Orange Center apartments, which Pendana at West Lakes replaced, Richardson Bradley said the area’s recent revitalization has been a “miraculous recovery.” She described Clear Lakes as “a rich neighborhood — not rich in money, but rich in people and experience.”

Richardson Bradley said she’s looking forward to enjoying the center’s cafe and other activities once it’s open. 

“I am ecstatic. I don’t know about anybody else, I can only speak for Shirley. But I love what’s going on,” Richardson Bradley said.

The $13.5 million wellness center project is a collaboration between Lift Orlando, AdventHealth, Orlando Health and Florida Blue, according to a press release.