It has been a soup kitchen and a shelter for the homeless during the winter.

Now the Annie Giles Community Resource Center at 1400 Oliver Hill Way is reopening as a community resource and training center named for late Whitcomb Court community leader Annie Marie Giles.

After six years of effort on her part, Councilwoman Ellen F. Robertson will lead a grand opening ceremony of the refur- bished city facility from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, July 31. The event is to include music, a job fair, distribution of free school supplies, booths with information on community resources and other activities, Ms. Robertson said.

Ms. Robertson said the plan is for the building and grounds to have multiple uses, including food production, community gardens and job development assistance for teens and young adults.

The building already is home to the nonprofit Underground Kitchen, which uses the center’s commercial kitchen to produces meals distributed in the Rich- mond area to relieve hunger, Ms. Robertson noted.

She said one element of the plan is for the city to work with the nonprofit to create more options for providing nutritious food to the neighborhoods on the surrounding hills.

To build on that, she envisions the creation of community gardens on the grounds that would allow the kitchen to get fresh produce on site and for area residents to grow their own produce, Ms. Robertson said.

A computer lab has been installed in the building as part of the refurbishing work to provide access to educational programs and to link users to employment resources and job opportunities, she said. City Hall “has obligations to add additional youth employment services and after-school programs” using the new lab.

A steering committee of 15 residents from the Whitcomb Court and Mosby Court public housing communities and from the Eastview neighborhood are to provide recommendations for additional programming, Ms. Robertson said. She said the steering committee would have support from professional advisors and the assistance of a volunteer in her office.

The center is an outgrowth of promises the city made in 2012 as part of the development of the new Richmond Justice Center across the street, Ms. Robertson noted. As part of locating the jail there, the city agreed to beef up services at the Giles Center.

That promise stalled until the Freedom House Conrad Center, as the center was known at the time, became available following the 2013 demise of Freedom House. Freedom House built the center in 2007 to serve as a meal distribution and assistance center for the homeless and low-income people.

Ms. Robertson pushed for City Council approval to buy the foreclosed building from a bank and secured $1.2 million to support the effort. In 2015, the city bought the property for $300,000. A cook training school and a landscaping training program were installed, but the city turned it into a cold weather shelter.

After two years of that operation, a frustrated Ms. Robertson had enough, particularly after adjacent vacant land was transformed into a homeless encampment in 2019. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she pushed the city into disbanding the camp and fencing off the land and also got a resolution through City Council blocking the building’s further use as a cold weather shelter, a hard blow to homeless advocates.

In the past year, the city has welcomed the Underground Kitchen and made improve- ments using the $900,000 that remained from 2015. As a result, the city was able to avoid reporting on the project’s progress and cost in its quarterly capital budget reports.