Published On: 08.18.15 | 

By: Nick Patterson

A place to be recognized

Above: Mark Farris, Site Director for Center for a New Generation, helps Jameriya at the A. G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club.

On a rainy summer afternoon in western Birmingham, a van drops off a load of kids still backpacking and wearing their school uniforms, chatting animatedly and lining up to check in at the desk of the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club’s Kirkwood R. Balton Unit.
They’re excited to be here, ready to take off for the music room or the dance room or one of the other spots in the building where they will continue to learn and have fun before its time to head home for the evening.

This is a happy place.

Jameriya CNG from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

Just ask Kendall Tucker, who has been coming here for much of his life, beginning when he was 6. At age 18, Kendall is beginning his senior year in high school and just about to age out of the program. But he already volunteers his summers to work as junior staff, helping the younger kids work through their activities.

“I loved coming in here and just looking for areas and doing all types of activities … anything creative,” Kendall said. “I have that type imagination. It’s just all over the place.”
As Kendall was growing up, his mother and grandmother tried to shelter him and his siblings from some of the ugliness they had seen in places they had lived.

“My mom … she saw things that I couldn’t even imagine. Shoot-outs right in front of her house,” Kendall said. She was upstairs and able to look out the window “and just see it all. She tried to keep me out of that kind of trouble.”

They moved around a lot, trying to avoid bad neighborhoods. His family made sure Kendall saw in the boys and girls club a pointer toward a better kind of life.

“Me being away from that, being in the boys and girls club … it kind of showed me that that is definitely not what I wanted to do, not where I wanted to be going.”
Kendall’s mom had also been in the club as had most of the family. “It was kind of like a generational thing,” Kendall said.

Early on, he got involved in various activities that made the club seem like a home away from home. “I was on the soccer team. I played T-Ball. I played baseball. I played football for a little bit … I always played basketball. Every year.”

The club also nurtured his interest in art, and music. The latter field is where he plans to make his career as a rapper and a music producer. For Kendall, the club opened up all kinds of opportunities to follow his interests. He recommends it not only for kids, but for adults as a place to volunteer and give back to kids who need it.

“Anybody that doesn’t come to the boys and girls club, I feel like they’re missing out,” he said.

Boys and Girls Club: Michelle from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

That’s just the kind of thing officials at the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club want to hear, according to Richard Curry, director of operations at the club, which has been open since 1966.
“The kids are not just part owners in the boys and girls clubs. They are the owners in the boys and girls clubs,” he said.

A.G. Gaston’s club has three sites — the one in west Birmingham, another in Bessemer and a third unit at Hayes K-8 School in the Kingston neighborhood just east of downtown Birmingham. The Kingston site is called the Center for A New Generation. Altogether, the club “serves more than 1,200 kids each year ages 6 to 18, both boys and girls,” Curry said. “We have three high-priority outcome areas: academic success, healthy lifestyle, and character and leadership development.”

“When the kids come here after school the first thing we want to give them is a healthy snack to kind of rejuvenate them from the day. Beyond that they’ll get some time to do a little bit of free play but of course, they get some homework and tutoring and assistance,” he said. “From that point they’re able to go to their different program areas to learn different things. So whether it be in the teen center learning job readiness skills or college and career skills, or in the dance room learning to dance or the music room learning how to sing, the possibilities are endless.”

Worlds of opportunity

Curry comes back often to the notion of endless possibilities when he talks about how the club opens up opportunities for kids to explore all kinds of new avenues.

“We most recently started Club Tech,” he said. “Club Tech is an opportunity for the kids to learn how to do things in the world of technology. Most recently, they created their own darkroom and printed their own pictures with a camera that they made. The whole thing about the boys and girls club is to give them opportunities and experiences.”

Each club unit focuses its offerings on what kids in the given community need and want, Curry said, with an emphasis on making learning fun.

The Center for a New Generation at Hayes, as one example, “is for the up and coming strivers at the school, and it’s really a partnership between Birmingham City Schools and A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club to offer a fun and educational enrichment program for after school,” Curry said. “The whole purpose of that is to increase student academic achievement and learning enjoyment and also parental engagement. That particular site offers karate and dance and theater for these kids to participate in.”

All the sites of the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club “are designed to fit the community they serve,” Curry said. Everything is based on the interest of the members, he said.

Boys & Girls Club staff describe Michelle as smart, adventurous and full of ambition.

Providing seasonal service

Boys and girls club sites are open during the summer from 7:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. When school starts, the sites are open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. This year, the longer summer hours were used to help prevent what has been called “summer learning loss,” the phenomenon where being out of school sometimes leads to kids forgetting what they learned the previous year.

“We hosted a program called ‘Summer Brain Gain’ and the whole concept … was to bring hands-on experience to bring learning to life so when they do go back to school they don’t go back totally lost. It’s something that they can take with them.”

The summer program also included field trips to McWane Center or the Birmingham Zoo based on what the kids were learning, and trips to college campuses for teen members of the club to help them get ready for higher education.

“All the field trips are based on that educational component,” Curry said. “And then of course, there are some days when we simply try to have fun.”

Ultimately, the idea of the clubs is to give kids what they need to be happy and successful.

“Our first thing is we want to create a safe and positive environment,” Curry said. “The second thing is we want to make sure that the kids have fun. Right underneath that, supportive relationships — making sure we have the right staff in place to engage with the kids. And then, it’s opportunities and expectations and the biggest thing that we do is recognition. Recognize, recognize, recognize … giving that kid opportunity to feel special, every day.”

For more information about the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club, visit www.aggbgc.org.

Other clubs

There are boys and girls clubs all over Alabama. Among them:

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