Boy With a Ball San Antonio
Last Week I had the opportunity to spend a day with one of Excel Beyond the Bell’s partner organizations, Boy With a Ball San Antonio (BWABSA). I spent time with the amazing two-person staff, Sergio Gonzalez and Pamela Torres. My day with BWABSA began with an introduction to their programs and history. Boy With a Ball is an international organization that officially launched in San Antonio in 2010 and now serves communities in Kenya, Nigeria, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Here in San Antonio, there are three main programs that Sergio and Pam work on throughout the year: Velocity, Union Pines Super Saturdays, and Summer Fusion. All three programs focus on building teams, outreach, mentoring in small groups and fostering skills which will equip the kids for community development.
Velocity is an after-school program at Harlandale which teams high school students up with middle school students in a mentor-mentee relationship.The lesson plan for this program is based on research done by Dr. Michael Karcher, Professor of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The main idea driving this program is that family, reading skills, culture, school and friends affect the child and who they become in the future.
Union Pines Super Saturdays are a slightly smaller scale and more casual program. This program consists of students from Harlandale visiting the apartment complex next to their school where they hold outdoor programs for youth in that community. Currently, there is a 5:00 p.m. curfew for all kids in the Union Pines apartment complex because the community has complained that if the kids stay out any later, they will vandalize cars and other property in the complex. BWABSA recognizes the importance of allowing youth to socialize and play outdoors and wants to extend this curfew or eradicate it completely. They hope to instead provide tools for youth to learn how to play together productively by building community relationships.
Finally, Boy With a Ball’s summer program is called Summer Fusion. This is a six week program where each week is focused to promote the growth of focused, motivated students and caring community members. It continues the structure of Velocity in that students from the community will work as mentors and leaders for younger children.
For another part of my day with BWABSA, we took a trip to meet with a potential sponsor. At the end of the day, we came back and I helped work on a two-pager that would be distributed to potential sponsors for the Summer Fusion camp. These experiences demonstrated the importance of cultivating and maintaining donor relationships for nonprofit organizations. I also learned about the difficulties involved in creating a compelling, concise and informative handout to attract donors.
The ultimate goal of BWABSA’s programs is to create a sustainable impact. If one student is affected by their programs, that student should have the tools to impact at least 12 other students, and so on. BWABSA aims to create a change in the structure of the south side of San Antonio and wants to foster a strong network of families, students and neighbors. Boy With a Ball is an organization run by caring and passionate people who genuinely care about the community they serve. I’m grateful to them for letting me visit for a day and I feel like I have made some cool new friends!