A Buddhist minister transforms a city block in Downtown Hendersonville.

by Kelly Drake . photo by Brent Fleury

Spend a little time around Pannavati and you’re bound to get a nickname. Since MyPlace opened its doors in January 2009, almost all 46 kids have been rechristened with names like Big Pete, Fire Engine, Preggo or Big Skittles. Actually, everybody has two nicknames—one they like and one they don’t. “When they start acting out, we call them by the nickname that they don’t like,” says the 60-year-old Washington D.C. native, who moved to the area to open a monastery in 2004 after reading a magazine article that described Asheville as the “spiritual Mecca of the East.”

Pannavati (who goes by only one name) got the idea for MyPlace after attending a community meeting in 2008. She was shocked by the number of homeless children in Henderson County. In some cases, they weren’t just poor kids. Many were from well-to-do homes. The following January, she turned her monastery near Downtown Hendersonville into a facility where up to 17 young people can live. Then last summer, she leased the Heritage Square building on Church Street, which became Gen Y, a 13,000-square-foot youth activity center. Now, the building houses an accredited self-paced high school; a dance club; a fitness center; Bubbalini’s Grill; a walk-in counseling center; a thrift shop; and a soon-to-be-completed black box theater. There are plans in the works for a recording studio and darkroom, and dance and cooking classes are already in full swing. Funding for MyPlace and Gen Y comes from private donors, community foundations, corporations and profits from the various youth-run businesses.

Pannavati has known since she was young that she wanted to help people. “I would have been a nun if I had been Catholic, but I wasn’t. I was Baptist, and we didn’t have nuns. Of course, now I’m Buddhist, and we do have nuns. So it all just works out really good,” she says. After spending several years in the corporate world as vice president of a financial company, and later pastoring a Christian church, she feels that all of her life experience has come together in MyPlace. Pannavati has been in the forefront, but it takes a crowd of volunteers, funders and supporters to pull everything together. “I work it 24/7,” she says, “but it really is a collaborative effort by many, many people helping where they can.”