After six years at the helm of the Mattahunt Community Center in Mattapan, Wheelock College has turned operational and financial control back to the city of Boston, where it will once again be run under the aegis of Boston Centers for Youth and Family.

The city restored the Mattahunt to its portfolio on July 1, and deployed a team of staffers on a three-month mission to “look at the transition more deeply, understand who the partners are, and see where the gaps are that BCYF can fill programmatically,” said BCYF commissioner Will Morales.

The facility, located on Hebron Street next to the namesake public elementary school, is a popular year-round resources for families who pay as little as $25 per year for programming that includes swimming lessons, yoga classes and tutoring. Under Wheelock’s stewardship, the center shored up a once-meager network of partnerships to run programs at the Mattahunt facilities, and Morales seeks to maintain those relationships.

“One of the things we don’t want to do is disrupt what Wheelock put in place there,” he said. “Wheelock is going to continue to be a partner with us in the future, especially in the area of education.”

In 2010, under the administration of former Mayor Thomas Menino, the city closed several of its 46 community centers, axing a significant sum of their funding from its budget and whittling the number of city-run centers to 35. Menino and BCYF officials had to quickly patch together deals and facilitate hand-offs to nonprofits, like the Boys and Girls Club, or private institutions like Wheelock.

Menino reached out to then-Wheelock president Jackie Jenkins-Scott – whom he had asked in 2007 to chair the city’s School Readiness Action Planning Team. Jenkins-Scott agreed to form a public-private partnership to manage the Mattahunt facility. After a rocky transition process that saw the shutdown of facilities and cancellation of summer programs at the center, Wheelock inked a five-year agreement to handle operations and costs. It extended the partnership for an additional year in 2015.

“Mattapan has been one of the more underfunded parts of the city for some time now,” said Rashad Cope, the Mattahunt director for the last five and a half years. “It made sense for Wheelock to go out there and get its students and mission more involved.”

Some 50 students at Wheelock, a college near Fenway with a focus on early childhood education, have volunteered extensively at the Mattahunt over the last five years. But the plan all along has been for Wheelock to hand operations back over to the city when the time is ripe. That time has apparently come.

The center hosted a barbecue in June and used the forum to field questions from concerned residents and parents, many with children at Mattahunt Elementary next door who regularly attend afterschool programs.

“We wanted to ensure there was a level of transparency as the center was transitioning,” Cope said. “We invited all partners, community members, any stakeholders with a vested interest. We invited them to the center and shared with them the update on the transition… really to reassure the community that the center will be open, that partnerships will continue, and that BCYF will not just come in and cut programs.”

It was critical to assuage reservations considering the significant pushback that came when the Menino administration pulled out of the center. Echoing the complaints of many neighborhood locals, Charles Yancey, then a city councillor representing Dorchester and Mattapan, told the Reporter in 2010, “The problem is that [the transfer to Wheelock] was not initiated by anyone in the community, didn’t have any community involvement.” He added, “It was purely a decision made by the Menino administration. ...The community was totally bypassed.”

Morales, who assumed the BCYF directorship in February and previously worked closely with the Mattahunt as a Wheelock employee in 2011, is confident the transition will be smooth this time.

“I want to make sure we look at some of the winning formulas that we have,” he said. “I want to look at what opportunities we can provide from the womb to the tomb, looking at healthy programming for children as well as seniors and adults in our city.”