PCYC’s Anne Long stepping down from top job, not North Minneapolis youth

By David Pierini staff reporter

The staff at Plymouth Christian Youth Center (PCYC) can’t remember ever seeing their executive director take a vacation.

So when Anne Long recently announced her retirement as its longtime leader, there’s 47 years worth of evidence to suggest the word retirement comes with an asterisk. Her retirement as the director for more than two decades will come “soon-ish.” Walking away from educating and nurturing Northside kids and teens, by her admission, is on indefinite hold. 

Anne Long photo by Pat Carney

“My husband and I are not big travel people,” Long said. “We both love North Minneapolis and I will absolutely remain a part of (PCYC) some way or another.”

Jim Long, husband and long-retired head of the center’s alternative high school, provides another significant tea leaf predicting his wife’ retirement. He still reports to PCYC most days doing whatever odd jobs are needed, from repairs to watering plants. 

Anne Long’s retirement date is fluid. First, the center’s board must find an ideal candidate and board members believe there will be a lengthy search. Second, Long wants to see the reopening of an ambitiously renovated Capri Theater, where many PCYC students received training in theater arts since the center took over ownership in 1986. 

The Covid-19 pandemic had slowed construction and a public opening of the theater isn’t expected until the restrictions on community gathering lift, hopefully sometime in 2021. 

“As we were starting to think about my retirement, the executive committee and I couldn’t retire with so much left to complete,” Long said. “I made a commitment to stay on until someone is found and I will be around to help with the on-boarding and around to celebrate the Capri.” 

PCYC bought the theater in 1986, a landmark where Prince performed his first live show in 1979 for $4 a ticket. At first, the Capri was a way for PCYC to expand its youth programmings but in the 1990s, PCYC leadership began to see the Capri as vital to a neighborhood and a catalyst to turn round North Minneapolis.

In 2015, PCYC started a capital campaign to raise $13 million to renovate the Capri, which will add a community hall for 125 people, available for smaller theater projects and community gatherings. It will also include a Best Buy Teen Tech Center.

“Miss Anne brought that with her vision,” said Cynthia Bryant, assistant dean of PCYC’s alternative high school. “She stayed on this because she believed this community deserves something amazing.

“This 5-foot-2-inch woman, quiet, with a smile out of this world, never has she walked around and said, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ Her name is not one part of (the Capri), but it should be. She raised the funds and put in her sweat and she doesn’t want  anything except to uplift kids and the community.”

During the annual meeting, Anne Long makes a point of recognizing and “celebrating” staff members each time they pass a five-year-period of employment. 

“Not once, have they been celebrated for what they brought,” Bryant said. “They should be celebrated to the utmost.”

Jim Long got a teaching job at PCYC in 1973 and Anne Long joined on as a part-time summer youth programming, organizing games and activities in a nearby park. 

Bryant was a teenager at Patrick Henry High School, her grades slipping, when she first arrived at PCYC as a kid at risk entering the alternative school. 

But the Longs didn’t see her that way. 

“They gave you the feeling that you can never fail, that you could accomplish any goal ” said Bryant, whose first job at PCYC was working in after-school programs. She was named assistant high school dean last year. “I don’t know what kind of woman I’d be, what kind of mother I’d be. They have something so pure that just fills you and makes you want to be the best you can be.”

Long is proud of the modern building that now houses PCYC, is eager to celebrate the renewed Capri Theater and proud of thousands of kids who have passed through the center’s doors. But she admits to feeling a bit unsettled, especially because of the recent civil unrest, the rise in violent crime this year and of course, how COVID-19’s shutdown of the center that keeps children from thriving in what is for many their only structure.

At the essence of very complex issues, is the question of how to keep kids safe, Long said.

“What is the effect of all the violence and the uncertainty in the lives of Northside kids,” she said. “We still haven’t quite cracked that.”