Home Away From Home : Youth: A community activist and a bishop have created an oasis where students can study, chat, weave flags or have their gang tattoos removed.

The idea was to create an oasis. Students at Jefferson High were looking for a place to study or talk. Members of a church were looking for a chance to reach out. Debrah Constance, a former real estate wheeler-dealer, the originator of this idea, was looking for all those things and a place for her to nurture.

Out of all this was born A Place Called Home. “The other PCH,” as Jefferson High School senior Sandra Gonzalez terms it.

The Place opened Friday in the community rooms of South-Central Los Angeles’ Bethel Church of Christ (Holiness), which rises majestically on an otherwise depressed stretch of East Adams Boulevard.

For four hours every weekday afternoon, it will offer a free, safe gathering place for students to hit the books, chat with friends or take a yoga class. Constance, until recently a highly paid real estate executive, raised a small pool of private funds and earned the blessing of church officials to establish what she hopes will become a self-sufficient, thriving youth center.

On Friday, volunteers, well-wishers and enthusiastic students converged for what turned into a daylong house party.

“There’s been nothing greater in my life--this is better than food!” said volunteer Juliana Wells.

Constance bounds through the narrow hallways in long black dress and Doc Martens, showing off the rooms like it’s an open house of the best real estate in Los Angeles--and on this day, as far as she’s concerned, it is. Alternating black and white balloons float from strings tied to the staircase banister; outside, a big, fat pink ribbon is wrapped in a bow around a post.

Written signs point out where music workshops and yoga classes will be held. On the first floor, volunteers bustle in with armloads of snacks and tables are set up with white plastic tablecloths. On the second floor is the centerpiece of A Place Called Home--an airy, light-filled room lined with three computers on one wall, rows of books, hardcover and paperback, along another, and in a corner, a loom and spools of brightly colored yarns.

“Kids are dying to learn to weave,” Constance says. “I have gangbangers who want to weave flags for their mothers.”

The gangbangers have not really materialized yet, but others have been drawn into Constance’s realm: the students she met at Jefferson High, real estate colleagues she has persuaded to help, church members she greets with hugs, volunteers she has corralled from neighborhoods reaching from the Westside to South-Central, fellow veterans of the 12-step substance abuse programs she has been through. She’s a one-woman rainbow coalition.

At this center, if you’re a kid, you can do plenty: your homework, Spanish lessons, computer work. Or nothing. (What you can’t do: drugs, drinking, smoking, graffiti, weapons. Kids sign a contract saying as much and get an ID badge--they say they’re cool to wear--which entitles them to be at the center.)

There will be round-table discussions about life and school. “We have a free tattoo removal service for exiting gang members,” Constance said.

There will also be a theater workshop, yoga, step aerobics and weightlifting. Some of these activities are still just concepts in Constance’s enterprising mind--there aren’t any weights to lift yet, for instance.

It was not hard to sell the church’s pastor, Bishop Matthew Richardson, on the center, and he in turn quickly sold his trustees and board on it. Theirs is a church that has existed since 1915 and was once a focal point in the black community in the 1940s and ‘50s. As the community changed and became overwhelmingly Latino, the predominantly black congregation mostly drove in to worship--and then drove out.

Richardson says he knew the church needed a greater connection with the community.

“We’re learning that children are children,” said Richardson, 67, a man with an easy eloquence. “If these children are around, we’re going to have to raise them--or move out. If we want to live in peace, we’re going to have to open our doors to them.”

Many of the kids in the center Friday were from a college preparatory program at Jefferson High. Some were people Constance had worked with when her project was in an earlier incarnation at another church--a relationship that ended in August and led to a new alliance between Constance and Bethel Church.

They have a three-month contract and say they can part amiably if things do not work out.

Constance, 46, has had a roller-coaster of a life.

A recovering alcohol and drug addict, she is also a cancer survivor of many years. She has had a variety of jobs and for the last 15 years--until the spring--she worked in real estate, most recently as director of marketing and community affairs for Jon Douglas Co.

Her personal struggles have given her an appreciation of what A Place Called Home could mean to the students who will gather there.

“I went into one student’s home; they were cleaning guns,” said Constance, her red hair cropped into a short fringe. “This is a strict family, a kid who’s not allowed out, who gets straight A’s. But it’s a rough neighborhood. These are good people, but this is a bad neighborhood.”