Survival Center taps new director

BY Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on March 16, 2007

A new director will take over the reins at the Amherst Survival Center next month.

Cheryl Zoll, a former professor who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as Amherst and Hampshire colleges, begins her new job April 4. She has a degree in biology from Harvard and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California in Berkeley.

Zoll is currently site director of the North Quabbin Adult Learning Center in Orange.

She succeeds Evangeline Westcott, the former longtime director of the food and clothing distribution and drop-in center at 1200 North Pleasant St. Westcott, of Orange, retired after 29 years at the center last summer, following complaints about its operations.

Zoll, who has lived in Amherst for about five years, is vice-chair of the town's Comprehensive Planning Committee. She has been a volunteer with a domestic violence hotline and was a volunteer cook for a summer at the survival center with her husband Eric Sawyer. They have an eight-year-old daughter, Lydia.

Zoll said she has been interested in the Survival Center since coming to Amherst: "I think anybody living in Amherst is aware of the Survival Center; it's such an important piece of the community. It is an amazing place."

Part of the challenge of the job is to build on the center's considerable strengths and to professionalize it, she said.

"My experience, so far, in dealing with the board is that it is very focused on this as a moment of change and a moment to grow. That was very decisive for me," Zoll said. "I just felt they were moving in the kind of direction I would like to be moving in and I think the center should be moving in. It feels like a good fit."

Zoll said she would begin working with the board members and staff to begin identifying which of the services the Survival Center now provides are key to its mission.

Before she left, Westcott said it might not prove feasible to continue providing food and clothing drop-off and distribution services the same way the center does now. Sorting through donations is a big job, and consumers have frequently clashed over how donations of clothing and household items should be distributed.

Aron Goldman, a consultant hired by the board in recent months to evaluate operations there, suggested that the center consider taking fewer food donations. Volunteers currently load up a truck with more than 1,000 pounds of food a week from Whole Food alone.

Zoll expects to work more closely with other agencies to which the center could refer consumers depending on their needs -- for counseling, shelter or help studying for their GEDs, for example.

"It will remain a survival center, obviously, but we're hoping it will grow into a place where people can come and have their needs met and then move into a place where there is less instability for them, a place where in hard times the Survival Center is there for you, but just doesn't give you what you need today," Zoll said.

Zoll said she envisions an agency that would give people "a step up through connections with other agencies. The question is, how will we get there?"