ST. LOUIS — Health care company Centene Corp. has donated its more than $25 million Ferguson claims center to the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, the largest donation to any Urban League in the country.
The building, at Pershall and New Halls Ferry roads, will allow the Urban League to relocate some initiatives, expand others, and eventually create up to 100 new jobs, said Michael McMillan, CEO of the local Urban League chapter.
“This historic donation is to empower, uplift and show people that Ferguson is moving forward,” McMillan said at the announcement on Thursday.
Centene opened the north St. Louis County facility in response to the civil unrest following the 2014 death of Michael Brown, a Black 18-year-old, who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson. Clayton-based Centene employed up to 250 people, mostly from the Ferguson area, at the center.
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Centene, under longtime leader Michael Neidorff, became a multibillion-dollar managed health care giant and one of the St. Louis’ region largest occupiers of office space with over 1 million square feet scattered across the area.
Neidorff was one of the first business leaders to publicly announce plans to give back to the Ferguson community following the unrest, announcing the new claims center about a month after Brown’s death. The facility opened in 2016. He was later appointed chairman of the National Urban League board, the only person from St. Louis to hold the position.
“I mean the circumstances are right for the kinds of things that took place there to happen elsewhere; we’ve seen it in Baltimore and elsewhere,” Neidorff told the Post-Dispatch in 2017. “I sat back and I said, ‘OK, if St. Louis is going to come out of this well and stronger, we have to show the country what the solution is to these kinds of issues.’”
He died in 2022 at the age of 79 after taking a medical leave from the company.
Around that same time, shareholders began pressuring Centene to make cuts to boost the public company’s profitability. The company killed plans to build an East Coast campus and also dumped most of its St. Louis-area office space on the market.
Its claims center in Ferguson, at 2900 Pershall, was one of the few buildings it had kept during its initial downsizing.
McMillan, the CEO of Urban League in St. Louis, said he approached Centene about his organization taking over the facility, which had largely gone unused as employees transitioned to remote work following the pandemic. The company agreed, and the building will be deeded to the organization by June. The city of Ferguson had issued bonds for the facility’s construction, which kept the facility from paying real estate taxes.
“We couldn’t ask for a better partner,” McMillan said.
At the Ferguson center, Urban League plans to house a Head Start childcare, its Save Our Sons and Save Our Sisters outreach programs, an Enterprise Bank branch as well as host events, conferences and other community gatherings. The location will also become a food distribution hub for the Urban League’s food pantries.
It will become the nonprofit’s third building in Ferguson — a community Urban League has made a focus since Michael Brown’s death, McMillan said. Its senior housing development, on the site of the former AutoZone that burned during the unrest, will open in May. Another project, he added, is in the works.
“We want to show St. Louis is building back this area that was devastated,” McMillan said.