The institute’s new home, a former convent in South Providence.

PROVIDENCE -- A temporary chain-link fence, now weatherbeaten and rusting in places, surrounds the red-brick building to keep out vandals, who have still managed to tag a few windows with bright orange paintball pellets and shatter at least one pane.

Nearly 70 years ago, the South Providence building was erected as a convent, a home for the teaching nuns of St. Michael the Archangel Church. For the last eight years it has sat vacant and decaying.

The Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, an organization that grew out of St. Michael Church to deal with the growing problem of youth violence in the city, has owned the building but has never called it home.

Now the organization is raising money to finish its long-delayed headquarters, with work to start in earnest in June.

The planned $5.8-million center at 265 Oxford St. represents a refocusing of sorts for the eight-year-old organization, which has gained prominence for its work mediating gang disputes in the city through its street workers program.

The main floor will be devoted to youth performance, studio spaces and a computer training room — services the organization is unable to offer at its current location, in the Pearl Street Lofts.

“This will be a social laboratory, a place where young people can come to change themselves,” said Teny O. Gross, the institute’s executive director. “While our victims services and street workers will still be important, our youth programs are going to grow. We’ll be able to offer a multifaceted way to combat violence.”

The Rev. Raymond Malm, who cofounded the institute, says the mission, in a way, shifts back to what had been originally conceived: a safe haven for city youths.

“The original vision was a place for kids to feel comfortable, where they could be really active and dialogue and solve problems and learn about nonviolence,” said Father Malm, who after spending a quarter-century in South Providence is now at St. Joseph Church in Newport.

Father Malm and Sister Ann Keefe established the institute in the summer of 2000 after five young parishioners were killed in violent confrontations. They set their sights on the parish’s former convent, across the street from the church, for its home.

The convent closed in the 1970s, and was home to a state-run residential treatment center for substance abusers, Talbot House, which eventually moved out.

With just one full-time employee — Gross, a former Israeli army sergeant — and little more than its name and a mission statement, the institute raised $500,000 in its first year. It set about doing major exterior work, including replacing the building’s roof, gutters, and windows and repointing the brickwork.

But instead of moving forward with the interior work, which, at the time, was estimated to cost $1 million, the institute focused on building its programs and staff.

“We needed to build our reputation. We’ve just been investing in human capital and programming,” Gross said.

Running out of the church’s rectory, the institute developed the programs that today are its hallmarks: the street workers, who respond to neighborhood, youth, and family conflicts; and victim’s services, which help those who have suffered violence or had a friend or relative killed in violence.

Today the organization has a staff of 26 mostly full-time employees, including 12 street workers. Operating out of a 3,500-square-foot rental space in the Pearl Street Lofts, off Broad Street, it has an annual budget of $1.3 million.

The institute offers nonviolence training and curriculums, which are based on the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It also operates the second-largest summer jobs program for youths in the city, Beloved Community. “We’ve outgrown our current space,” Gross said.

The projected cost of completing the new home has increased considerably: $4.8 million gets the building’s four floors and basement mostly renovated, and $1 million to establish an endowment to cover yearly expenses.

Inside the building, humidity has caused the floorboards to sag. White paint is falling off in sheets from crumbling walls. There is rot throughout from where water pipes had burst from age and cold.

The convent’s former chapel, with its soaring ceilings, will be the main performance area. The upper floors will house offices. The targeted opening is April 2010.

“We’ll be able to widen our reach throughout Rhode Island,” Father Malm said. “We’ll be able to bring kids from outside the city here for retreats and offer so much more than what we first envisioned.”

Funding for the project comes largely from tax credits, with the state contributing $785,000 in historic credits and the federal government contributing nearly $1.6 million via the historic tax credit and new market tax credit programs. The institute has also secured a $100,000 Community Development Block Grant from the city and about $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A drive is under way to raise $500,000, which the institute must accomplish by April to receive a $500,000 matching grant from the Champlin Foundation. The organization is about $175,000 shy of its goal.

pmarcelo@projo.com