When the village of Panama celebrated its centennial in 1988, its residents raised about $10,000 to build a new community center — something that so far as village board president Eric Johnson knows, the town has never had.

Nearly 20 years later, it still doesn’t.

Meetings are held in the basement of the bank or sometimes at the cafe, Johnson said. A senior citizens’ group meets in the church basement, he said, but the steps make it difficult for some older residents to attend.

For wedding dances and graduation parties, Panama residents used to rent Hallam Auditorium, he said. But the May 2004 tornadoes that ravaged Southeast Nebraska destroyed it.

So now the need is greater than ever.

“It’s one of those things we’ve dreamt about for years and years,” Johnson said.

But while the $10,000 the community raised back in 1988 is a start, it isn’t nearly enough, and the town has had trouble raising more. Panama  hasn’t qualified for Community Development Block Grants or other federal funding sources, he said.

But last fall, Johnson and Bill Bryant, Panama’s volunteer fire chief, contacted the Lancaster County Extension Office, which put them in touch with N. Brito Mutunayagam, a professor of community and regional planning in the School of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an extension specialist.

Mutunayagam charged one of his classes with finding a way for Panama to get its community center.

And they did.

They spent last semester evaluating the community’s needs, then recommended the town build a combination fire hall and community center because it needs a new fire hall, too.

They advised the village to sell some publicly owned land, which would also generate an ongoing source of tax revenue.

Without Mutunayagam’s students, Panama would have never received such a broad range of ideas, Johnson said.

And without Panama, Mutunayagam’s students would have missed out on a valuable lesson.

The students got to work in a real community with real clients on a real project, he said. And they got to do something good for Nebraska.

“This is our home state,” Mutunayagam said. “We want our young people to become stakeholders in the future of our state.”

The College of Architecture also has worked on community planning projects with Hallam, Crawford and Bellevue, among others.

Mutunayagam believes these partnerships, which started about seven years ago, are ideal for the university, combining the college’s mission as a land-grant institution to work with communities across the state and the mission to provide students with an education.  

Monica Sanford agrees.

The UNL architecture senior has worked on three service-learning projects, although not the one in Panama. She’s also written about the benefits of service-learning programs, and hopes to present on the topic at architecture conferences this summer.

Among the biggest benefits, she said, is that the projects teach students how to work with real clients and real budgets. 

“If you’re working without any sort of client, basically you can just do whatever you want for fun,” she said.

That might lead to an interesting design, she said, but there’s more to architecture.

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful a piece of architecture is if it doesn’t just physically work, or if it doesn’t benefit any human in a way,” she said.

The community planning project that Mutunayagam’s students undertook last semester was so successful, another professor decided to continue it this spring.

Nate Krug had his architecture students each submit a design for the new building.

Those students will present their designs — 16 in all — at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Panama Cafe. Models of their designs will be on display, Krug said, and each student will give a short presentation on his or hers.

From there, Johnson said, community members will likely take aspects of some of the designs to a professional architect.

Whether the community building actually gets built remains to be seen, he said.

Panama will still have to find more money for the project, but the architecture and community planning students have helped generate more enthusiasm and put the idea back on the minds of Panama residents, he said.

“It’s been a long, slow process, but it’s continued to move,” he said.

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.