PETERBOROUGH — The Club Cannon Teen Center will not close at the end of this month, Creating Positive Change Coalition director Sam Lafortune said Tuesday.

“The plan is to fund-raise to keep the teen center open,” Lafortune said.

In May, Lafortune said the teen center could close at the end of August because state funding to run the center had dried up.

Because of the poor economy, it is difficult to find funding to keep a teen center open so that teens can just hang out, Lafortune said. The funding out there is for programs, she said.

In the midst of the financial crisis this summer, teen center coordinator Scott Shepherd left. Since then, two AmeriCorps volunteers took his place.

The volunteers — Christina Altieri, 21, of Jaffrey and Michael Hayden, 22, of Rindge — are graduating from Franklin Pierce University next spring. Altieri is majoring in fine arts with a concentration in photography, glass blowing and ceramics. Hayden is majoring in arts management with a concentration in music.

Tuesday Altieri and Hayden said they plan to stay on this fall to keep the center open for area teens. They both said they love having a positive impact on the teens at the center and want to keep it going for them.

“I think it’s a really important place for kids to go,” Hayden said.

“The kids really love this place,” Altieri said. “I think that’s great because not many places like this exist anymore.”

Altieri and Hayden came to the CPCC this summer as AmeriCorps volunteers to run a teen drug and alcohol prevention program, Project Venture, and a teen media literacy program, Media Power Youth.

With a group of Jaffrey teens, Altieri and Hayden combined the programs. The Jaffrey teens named their group Beyond the Box.

Lafortune was trying to focus on programming, because that is where the funding is, so she accepted an offer for the use of space at the Quaker church in Jaffrey for the Jaffrey group, she said. The idea is that these youth programs can be funded and run in different communities, she said.

When the teens needed Internet access for their projects, though, they started meeting at the Club Cannon Teen Center.

That’s when Altieri and Hayden began helping out. They added an arts and crafts section, experimented with later summer hours and held a karaoke night.

“I feel like I’m really affecting them. That we’re giving them something good to do over the summer,” Hayden said.

And when Shepherd recently left, they took over as co-coordinators.

“We want to be here as much as we can,” Altieri said.

She said she hopes that when their AmeriCorps service ends at the end of the month, CPCC will hire them as part-time employees.

“We’re kind of in the gray zone, in-between, trying to make the most of it,” Altieri said. “We’re still trying to scrape everything together to find alternative funding. Hopefully we are finding that funding.”

Lafortune said, the teen center coordinator position, which not only included supervising the center’s open hours, but paper work as well, will likely be divided into several part-time positions.

Lafortune said she would love it if Altieri and Hayden could work their class schedules around the teen center’s fall hours.

“Chris and Mike have been enthusiastically accepted by the kids,” Lafortune said.

Lafortune said she is working to fund the center through a mix of grants and private donations. “The hope is that we see some continued support for the teen center and the activities that go on here.”

Collaborative efforts with other non-profits are a key part of keeping the center and its programs running, she said. “Everybody has a little less. But everybody has more, [when they are] sharing.”