RON HICKERSON | STAFF
Children in the Dogwood Terrace Boys and Girls Club participate in a geometry lesson as they make three-dimensional shapes from pipe cleaners as visual learning tools.
By Ron Hickerson, Cheif Reporter
The Boys and Girls Club of America has reached out to the Augusta, Ga., area, seeking to help its children improve in their studies, health and behavior.
The Boys and Girls Clubs of the CSRA has been part of Augusta for the past 62 years, said Kam Kyzer, the executive director of the organization. Now with seven locations spanning across Richmond, McDuffie and Washington counties, the organization is dedicated to serving children from ages 6 to 18. It comes into contact with 600 children daily and 3,000 children per year. The organization works with them to promote its three primary outcomes: academic success, a healthy lifestyle, and good character and citizenship.
Of the 3,000 children that come throughout the year, Kyzer said 1,700 attend the organization’s after-school program regularly, which she said is very important.
“The more often a child comes to the program, the greater impact we can have on their lives,” she said. “If we can get kids to come more often over the course of the year and if we can get them to stay in the program for more years, then they’re going to have a lot more better outcomes.”
In order to better serve children in need, Kyzer said the organization is strategically located near high-poverty areas, situating their clubs either in or next to public housing where 90 percent of children come from single-parent, transient households earning less than $25,000 per year. She said this environment makes a huge impact on its children.
“Every 26 seconds, a child in our country drops out of school,” she said. “So, in my opinion, we can’t work hard enough or fast enough to make our programs the best that they could possibly be because you can’t capture that time.”
Kyzer said the organization’s after-school program captures children at the most crucial time of the day: between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. During this time, children are usually left unsupervised and that’s when the majority of juvenile crime happens, also making them more likely to become a victim of a crime.
“That time we get every single day, we treat as a precious resource,” she said. “You can’t get it back. They don’t get a day younger; they get a day older every day.”
In order to serve these children, Kyzer said the organization has two major needs: community support and volunteers.
As a United Way organization, Kyzer said, 5 percent of its operating cost, which amounts to $3.2 million, comes from public funding. While the organization is also funded by federal grants, the majority of its funding comes from private donors. With that money, the organization is able to hold its after-school program as well as provide the children with resources that may have been inaccessible to them.
“We don’t want to duplicate services,” Kyzer said. “We just want to reduce all barriers and increase access, so that the kids served at the boys and girls clubs have all the opportunities that any child not in the same socioeconomic situation would have.”
In order to bring about the most access to resources for these children, the organization often partners with other organizations in the Augusta area. One such organization Kyzer mentioned was the Junior Medical Leagues, a student organization from Georgia Regents University.
“It’s really about trying to make sure that they get excited about science education and they can see the possibilities of what can happen if they stick with it and make good grades,” said Alexis Rossi, the director of diversity training and evaluation and co-advisers to the organization.
Linda James, the director of diversity outreach at Georgia Regents and co-adviser to the organization, said the group was established in 2004, and since then it has aimed to help students of all backgrounds to become more medically literate and exposing them to careers in medicine.
She said medical students volunteer and visit the Dogwood Terrace Boys and Girls Club, located on 15th Avenue, once a month and conduct hands-on learning modules like making cell models out of candy to learn about cellular anatomy or learning how to suture a wound by suturing a cut made in orange peels.
Along with these learning modules, the children at the club are paired with the medical students who mentor them.
“The one-on-one relationship with a caring adult is what makes the difference,” Kyzer said. “You can have all the programs, all the tutoring, all the field trips you want, but that one-on-one caring relationship with an adult is what gives the program all its power.”
Victor Wongk, a second-year medical student at Georgia Regents and the president of the Junior Medical League, said it has been incredible to be able to combine mentoring with his medical profession.
“The most rewarding thing to me has been being able to be a part of the kids’ lives,” he said.
James said most of the league’s members have been recipients of programs that have given them the resources they needed to get to where they are, so the opportunity to give back to the community is really important to them.
“They’ve taken advantage of properties that we have provided to them to help them move forward in their career and achieving their goals of become physicians, and so they’re giving back,” James said.
Kyzer said frequent volunteers provide stability in the face of these children’s transient lifestyles. She said she wants every child who comes into one of the clubs to graduate high school with a plan for his future, and for the past three years the organization has had a 100 percent graduation rate.
She said this is the most rewarding work she could have ever made her career.
“The Boys and Girls Club is an organization that is very near and dear to my heart,” she said. “When we hire folks to work in the program, you have to qualified, but you really have to share the passion for our mission, which is to inspire and enable all young people, especially those who need us most to reach their full potential. It has to be a burning fire in your belly. You don’t get paid enough. You have to work way too hard. You have to wear too many hats in a non-profit setting, so it really has to be a love for what you do.”