Woodson Road exists to move people somewhere else. Chain hotels, airport parking, the low hum of Lambert International just past the tree line. It is not, by any measure, a destination. Elizabeth Mitchell would like a word about that.
Rize Event Center & Catering sits at 4444 Woodson Road, which is to say it sits in the middle of everything described above and refuses to act like it. People who have been inside say the same thing: The website does not do it justice. Walk through the door and the road disappears. What replaces it is a 30-foot stage Mitchell built herself, a commercial kitchen, a room that seats 150 and something harder to quantify. “When you walk in there,” Mitchell said, “I want you to feel like you belong there. Like a big hug.”
Mitchell spent decades in St. Louis classrooms, from public schools to the halls of Harris-Stowe State University, and came away with one consistent finding: The young people who needed a place the most were the ones least likely to have one. The older ones too, she would add. The need doesn’t age out – it just stops being acknowledged. Art, she found, was the one shorthand nobody had to learn. “Whatever the situation,” she said, “it’s a healer.”
That conviction is the foundation of Rize. A Wednesday night open mic where the Drew Project, one of St. Louis’s most beloved live bands, plays with whoever has the courage to get up. A murder mystery dinner theater, script written by Mitchell’s daughter Rachel, the entire space transformed into a New Orleans jazz club for the occasion. A pop-up vendor fair spilling onto the sidewalk on a June afternoon. On June 27, a Stevie Wonder tribute. Mitchell built all of it for that purpose – for the teenager finding their voice and the 70-year-old finding it again, because she believes, from long experience, that what happens when those two people are in the same room is exactly what a community is supposed to look like.
In a community like Woodson Terrace, where childhood poverty runs significantly higher than national averages and the landscape offers considerably more infrastructure for people passing through than for people who live there, what Mitchell is building is not incidental. It is necessary. She is 66, she is on what she calls her second wind, and she has invested her own capital into a building she does not own – the conviction of someone who has already given one career to this community and is not finished. “They’re forgotten,” she said of the young people she hopes will find their way to Rize’s open mic nights. “And I think that’s why a lot of times they act out – because they don’t have a place where they can come and express themselves.”
Rize is also, practically speaking, an opportunity. The commercial kitchen is available for pop-up dinners and commissary use, an entry point for food entrepreneurs and caterers who need professional space without the overhead of building their own. The first pop-up, held the day before Mother’s Day, was a success. A Father’s Day edition follows June 6, this time moving outside. The space is available for concerts, corporate events, private functions and professional development programming. Mitchell envisions a hybrid nonprofit model that would allow the arts programming to grow beyond what a single woman with a vision and a personal investment can sustain alone.
That is where the rest of us come in. Rize is not looking for charity. It is offering partnership – a stage, a kitchen, a room that makes people’s jaws drop and a woman with 40 years of experience in education and the arts who knows precisely what this community is missing and has already done the hardest part of building it. What it needs now are sponsors willing to see what Mitchell already sees: that a room where a teenager finds their voice for the first time, or an elder sits in the front row of a Stevie Wonder tribute on a Wednesday night, is not a small thing. It is, depending on what you believe about what a community is for, exactly the thing.
For sponsorship inquiries and booking information, visit Rize Event Center & Catering online or reach Mitchell directly through the contact information on the website.