Bill Powell, chair of the board of the Greater Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame, introduced our own Bart McFadden, the President and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Tennessee Valley.
Bill noted that the 44th Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will be Aug. 21 at 6 p.m. at the Knoxville Convention Center with former Vol Ron Slay, now on the SEC Network, as a guest speaker. It will benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Tennessee Valley. “It helps in so many ways,” said Bill. “By Allowing us to feed the kids, give them some recreation, help them with homework, give them some love, show them that they are valued, keeping them off the streets and away from the drug lords and the gangs. We’ve shown that it takes about $3,000 to have a child on scholarship there, and that it takes about $30,000 to keep them in juvenile. So, you get a good return on your investment—and you might just save a life.”
Bart McFadden mentioned that Jim Alexander has served on the Boys & Girls Club board for a number of years, and that there are very few people who have been as supportive as Jim has been in Bart’s time with the BGCTV. Bart mentioned that he himself attended the Boys & Girls Club as a youngster in Johnson City, and he has worked with Boys & Girls Clubs in Spartanburg, SC, the national office, the club at Disney World, LaGrange, GA, and Chambers County, Alabama.
“Our organization serves about 7,500 kids on an annual basis,” said Bart. “Let me bring that more real for you right now we’re we start our second week of summer yesterday. Right now, there’s between 1,700 and 1,800 kids in the boys and Girls Club in this region right now, and that happens every day throughout the entire year across those 25 locations in five counties—Knox, Blount, Loudoun, Anderson, Claiborne, and Campbell will be opening soon. And we think about the impact our organization needs to make in this community. Summer is especially critical time, for a number of reasons that I’ll talk about.
“Let me tell you a quick story about what that means last summer: the 5th day of summer a young man comes into our club on Middlebrook Pike at West Park Baptist Church. He is 8 years old. It’s a Monday. His dad had taken his own life on Saturday. And where was that little boy on Monday? At the Boys and Girls Club. And thankfully, through some of the programs that I’ll talk about here in a minute, we were able to deploy resources and people to meet those needs.’
“But it made me really think about, OK, if that young man had not been in one of our clubs if he’d just been one of these kids that maybe last key kids stay at home wrestling with the loss of his father. And had he not had that intervention over the next eight to 10 weeks with the catastrophic effect event, and as Bill said in his remarks, again whether it’s simply feeding them, making sure they’ve got something to eat or meeting much more sophisticated and grave needs like I just described, we meet the needs of kids. We connect with the community around us. That’s something we’re strategically doing as an organization right now to put our clubs, push our clubs more out in the community. We said in our organization right now we want our people and our programs to be closer to where kids live and go to school and be more accessible.”
“We are open 242 days a year, over 1,500 hours a year. When you think about a school year, it’s about 180 days and about 1,100 hours.
The mission of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Tennessee Valley is to enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens.
The vision is to be the place for youth in East Tennessee by providing opportunities and relationships that build their sense of belonging and unlock their potential for lifelong success.
Its core values:
- We meet the needs of kids.
- We connect with the community around us.
- We recognize the value and potential in those around us.
- We expect the best.
- We invest in our people.
- We change lives and can prove it.
Its key areas of impact are:
- Child Care • 7,600 Youth served annually • Affordable rates for families • Open 242 days and 1,500 hours per year. •
- Academic Support • Providing daily enrichment and small group intensive tutoring to promote academic proficiency.
- Member Emotional & Social Health • Preventive and intervention strategies and activities to ensure members develop positive self-image, coping, and decision-making skills.
- Workforce Development • Providing experiences for members to have hands-on career exploration and gain first-job skills.
“Talking about workforce development, we’ve got about 50 high school kids out at Pellissippi’s Strawberry Plains campus doing what we call technical training camps, where they’re engaged in fully immersive experiences and careers that are in demand in this community and will be for the probably the next generation. And they’re getting that exposure to figure out what they’re interested in, if they’re good at it and then we’ll give them a chance to pursue it.
“Academically we support kids pre-K through graduation. Pre-K is something we started about three years ago, initially at Lonsdale, to meet a need. Because KCS came to us and said, hey, here’s the issue: We’re having our pre-K kids, we’ve got a lot of empty seats and our pre-K programs, they were under enrolled, and the attendance level was less than desired. And the reason is very simple: Transportation is not provided for pre-K and the program ends at 1:30 every day. So put on the hat of a working parent. What do you do? You take your lunch hour every day to go pick them up and take them to another place to stay for the last 3-4 hours a day. You just don’t enroll them. You send them to daycare. And we stepped in to fill that. We’re now at Lonsdale Elementary, South Knoxville Elementary, Moreland Heights Elementary, and Dogwood Elementary. Next year we’ll be adding West Haven, Christenberry, and Belle Morris.
“Then you move on up the ladder to third grade reading. Many of you are aware of our state’s third grade-retention law and the importance of third grade reading. Statistically speaking they will tell you that if a kid is not reading on a grade level proficiency at 3rd grade, the likelihood of high school graduation is not very high. If you go back into the 90s, there were states that were building prison square footage based off of 3rd Grade literacy.
“Academically we’re making sure they’re progressing each year that they are hitting their benchmarks every single year when they get to middle school, making sure that they’re getting those key skills and math and algebra because that’s an indicator for 9th grade success and 9th grade success is the ultimate indicator for high school graduation probability.
“We follow our kids. All the way through this process. That’s one thing that really differentiates us from other organizations and even differentiates us from schools. Our boys and girls love the consistency of staff, and the relationships stays year after year after year.
Our academic support programs include homework help, the tutoring, college and career readiness, college preparation and tours, and summer enrichment programs. We’re not just taking them to four-year schools. We’re on the campuses of two-year schools, trade schools, large private institutions across the southeast so that they can see whatever path to their future that they believe they can pursue.
And then right now we’re in the midst of our summer enrichment program to help kids stay on grade level or move up.
Next is our member emotional and social health. This really is a fancy way of saying youth mental health. This is the program that we run with four full-time social workers annually, about six interns from UT’s College of Social Work to really help the young people in our clubs overcome the impact of childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
“That’s done in a number of different ways: One is our small group interventions where we bring kids together where they can build relationships with their peers. We live in a time where kids are more connected but more disconnected than they’ve ever been. So many kids don’t even know how to have conversations with their peers. They don’t feel connected to their peers. They feel very isolated, and that leaves them very vulnerable to negative influences. They also don’t feel connected to adults and in our clubs. This program specifically really seeks to ensure that. Kids are connected to their peers and to adult role models that are giving them coping skills to be resilient and battle life challenges.
“Everybody in this room has dealt with stuff our kids deal with stuff. But without a social network, without those relationships to build resiliency, that’s when you fall victim to the real impacts of that long term. So this program you can see last year, 437 kids were directly impacted by this program, 100% of the kids said that after the interventions, they reported increased mental health and more happy days, and this is a research survey that we do in partnership with the pair institute out of Harvard and the Pacific Life Foundation for Pacific Youth Foundation. 87% of the kids said that after interventions they were reported an increase in social and emotional skills they could deal with things they could understand what’s going on around them better. And then 93% said that they could identify a stable adult they could talk to. The sad reality is, in today’s world, that 93% is far greater than the average. So, placing those relationships in the lives of kids is so very important.
For our Healthy Lifestyles Program, we did an activity where our kids run the 26.2 miles of a marathon over a couple of months. That equated to over 411 marathons. Unfortunately, in Tennessee, our kids, generally speaking, just aren’t physically healthy. In childhood obesity, we’re not very good. And so, making sure their kids are physically active on a daily basis.
One of the cool things that we do is our cooking clubs, where kids learn how to prepare a number of dishes. Then the kids will be able to take those recipes home. Some 270 kids in that last year, learning how to be a self-sufficient citizen.
Then our gardening clubs and to help feed into that. We got more kids gardening, 677, than we got cooking. Probably not a bad thing.
Last on the program up front is our Youth Force Program, our workforce development for 327 participants age 14-18 from six Knox County high school— Karnes, Powell, West Central, Austin East, and Fulton, where we’ve got full time staff in those schools providing college and career counseling to low income and potential first generation college students, making sure that they understand, hey, graduation is not the goal, it’s the launchpad. So, what is our plan for life after graduation and ensuring we’ve got that? We put kids in paid internships with business partners across this community. Kids can work in our program up to 200 hours of paid internship, working in a career field that they may have an interest in with a partner that’s interested in helping develop their interest. The most important thing for our kids is that they’ve got a reference for that next job application. They’ve got somebody who can vouch for them, their work ethic, their character, their ability to learn and communicate so important.
“The other piece is the technical training camps that we do largely in partnership with Pellissippi State, LMU, the University of Tennessee, and South College, where they really get hands on experience with careers that are in demand in our community, such as welding, cybersecurity, nursing, engineering, manufacturing. It runs the gamut, and we’ll have 15 cohorts of kids that go through that this summer to get that hands on experience.
“The Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony is the biggest event our organization each and every year, and this year will be the 44th Greater Knoxville Sport Hall of Fame ceremony. And for many of you, you know that this was started by Buck Vaughn many years ago with a vision. And just a lot of passion. Mack Gentry was part of the initial selection committee. He and a team of a few others help get this started back. At the first Hall of Famer, we had 40 or 50 people, so we’ve gotten bigger. Now this event serves about 1,000 people. Come and join us to celebrate great athletes, great accomplishments that embody the lessons and life values that we want to instill in the kids, in our clubs.” The speaker, Ron Slay, has talked about how the Boys & Girls Club of East Nashville was so important to him as a youngster, especially when his family found itself homeless.
In Q&A, Bart mentioned that, from a budget of some $14 million, they might lose some $2.5 to $3 million in federal funding.