3 minute read
Spring 2025 Newsletter
Sometimes it just takes one person to say, “You can do this!” to inspire confidence and bold moves. A pivotal moment for us was when Kevin Harvick came to play with our kids and through our fence, noticed illicit activity at one of the houses adjacent to our Armstrong Youth Center on Niles Street and asked, “Does that go on every day in front of your kids?” Followed up by, “We have to do something to get you that property so you can safeguard your kids and do something amazing!” So, after a generous donation from the Harvick Foundation matched by the Wheeler Foundation, we purchased the property on Monterey and bulldozed the dilapidated houses creating an open space for us to dream about.
With this new opportunity came a lot of brainstorming and visualizing how the property could help us better serve our youth and offer
teens activities that would help them get future ready. We quickly realized that property could be a huge solution to the challenges we faced with all the growth in the past couple of years, as well as the expansion of our Life and Workforce Readiness Program for teens and young adults. With limited space, we were running multiple teen programs that continued to be impacted by competition for programs for our school -age children and increased team members in our current club house.
What if we could expand our robust teen program in a facility built specifically to address their social-emotional learning, educational needs, leadership development, workforce readiness, paid internships and future ready activities? Our board quickly agreed that the additional space was overdue and that our teens deserved to have access to life changing programs housed under one roof.
So, where do we stand now? We have multiple partners in the process including an architect, an engineer, a former board member volunteering to help oversee the construction process, a consultant that used to be a successful executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs in Utah and oversaw several successful capital campaigns, a committed dynamic board of directors, the ingenuity and expertise of a
strong executive Boys & Girls Club team, and a stellar track record for keeping our commitments to the youth of our community at 71 separate locations throughout Kern County.
Our hope is that in the next few years we will have completed a healthy capital campaign, our teens’ state of the art/future ready building is in the works, our NilesMonterey Streets Club property is now enclosed in a safe campus environment, and we have moved the needle in our commitment to helping the youth entrusted to our care build great futures for themselves, families and community.
Please consider this an open invitation to visit us for a tour of our Club and hear about how we plan to get our kids future ready in a program built around their needs, dreams, and potential.
