Boys and girls in the 64130 are still waiting for their new club
The ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Crown Center sparkles with Kansas City’s philanthropic elite. A quick scan of the room picks up familiar faces from the business pages, such as Embarq CEO Tom Gerke with his wife, Rhonda. The open bar is rocking the way an open bar should be when guests pay $300 a ticket.
They’re here for “Kids Night Out,” the fundraiser for the nonprofit Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City. The group spends approximately $2,397 annually for each member — the cost of services and maintaining a safe place to hang out after school. But it charges only $15 a year per child, and, with many parents facing financial hardship, the fee often goes uncollected. No kids are turned away.
Outside the ballroom doors, more guests sip drinks and examine the tables of silent-auction items lining the hall. Among other treasures, the millionth Harley-Davidson built at the factory in Kansas City leans on its kickstand, awaiting bids. Several of tonight’s guests, asked about the charity by a reporter, confuse it with the unrelated Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Unlike that group, though, the Boys & Girls Clubs’ mission depends on location. The five centers across Kansas City — one in Wyandotte County, two in Independence and two on the city’s East Side — are in parts of the metro rarely traveled by the well-heeled.
On the mezzanine, one floor beneath the ballroom, a dozen kids from each of the metro’s five
Boys & Girls Clubs devour pizza while the adults upstairs dine. The entertainment for the evening is an Inside the Actors Studio-style interview with Julie Andrews. The adults know her as Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp; the kids are more likely to recognize hers as the voice of the queen in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third.
When the night is over, a Boys & Girls Clubs spokesman will call the 2009 event a success and say it raised more than $600,000 for the charity.
It’s a healthy sum, especially during a recession. But it’s not enough for what the Boys & Girls Clubs want to do.
If a donor to the Boys & Girls Clubs is curious about where the money goes, he or she needs only to step inside the 47,000-square-foot Thornberry Unit, at 43rd Street and Cleveland. The core of the building went up in 1935, but an $8.9 million renovation that began in 2002 has transformed it into “the Cadillac of clubs,” as chapter President David Smith calls it.
Inside, the place looks like a college student union — office space, Wi-Fi accessibility in the lobby, computer labs and a TV lounge for the older teens. Next door to the lounge is a well-equipped weight room overseen by Program Director Anna Martin, a weightlifting coach who was an alternate in the 2004 Olympic trials. The shiny blond floor of the new gym runs the length of two full basketball courts. The old gym, still in very good shape, remains in an older part of the building, along with an Olympic-sized pool.
At the club, as the older teens call it, programming includes visits by tutors to help with schoolwork, and visits by health professionals, who talk about things like sex (that is, not having it).
A carrot-and-stick approach is at work here: homework periods and tutoring sessions in exchange for coveted gym access.
A set of concrete stairs leads to the second floor, where a cafeteria serves breakfast, lunch and snacks. A small eating area overlooks the gym through Plexiglas windows.
Across the street is Cleveland Park, where a $2 million baseball diamond was recently installed for the club’s RBI program — Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities.
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The Thornberry Unit is the area’s largest club site, serving as many as 450 kids a day with a membership of 2,800. The $8,966,550 price tag on the renovation was raised ahead of schedule, thanks to contributions from philanthropies such as the Hall Family Foundation ($2 million) and the Mabee Foundation ($1.8 million).
But the opposite is true at the Boys & Girls Clubs’ East Side Unit, where administrators have promised a renovation for five years. If the Thornberry Unit is the Cadillac of clubs, the East Side Unit is a rickshaw.
The East Side Unit stands in the middle of the most dangerous neighborhood in Missouri. According to a Kansas City Star series this past winter titled “Murder Factory,” more of Missouri’s inmates serving sentences for murder or voluntary manslaughter come from the 64130 zip code than from any other in the state.
Because the neighborhood is also one of Kansas City’s hardest-hit by the foreclosure crisis, it’s hard to find one block without several boarded-up homes. Many front lawns are littered with abandoned furniture. There’s no real grocery store for miles.
It wasn’t always this desperate. Longtime residents remember Minute Circle, the community center on the corner of Elmwood and 24th Street, where kids played basketball and learned boxing, elderly folks gathered to catch a bus ride to the store, and anyone could drop in for a free meal. Financial problems forced its closing in August 2004, turning away more than 1,000 regular visitors.
Before disbanding, the Minute Circle board agreed to sell its building to the Guadalupe Center, an organization in the Latino community that offers similar services. At the same time, the Heart of America United Way, which once funded Minute Circle, looked for another organization to support in the neighborhood and chose the Boys & Girls Clubs. Without United Way funds, the Guadalupe Center’s hold on the former Minute Circle building was short-lived. In June 2005, a fire gutted the building. The Guadalupe Center sold the remains to the Boys & Girls Clubs in September 2005.
The leadership of the Boys & Girls Clubs, which had funding for 24th Street but no building, set up shop just a few blocks east of Minute Circle, in a storefront rented from the Salvation Army that became the East Side Unit.
Past smudged glass doors in front of the check-in desk, East Side Unit Director Vanessa LaBarrie greets visitors with a genuine, youthful smile and a hug. She’s a 10-year veteran of the Boys & Girls Clubs. Her tour of the space doesn’t take long because there isn’t a whole lot to see.
On a good day, 100 kids will visit the East Side Unit. The walls are cartoon blue, red, green and yellow — the kind of paint job that attempts to cheer up an institutional place. A wall of Polaroids introduces the staff. Tacked up everywhere are posters on glossy paper urging kids to stay in school, avoid drugs, make smart decisions.
Past the younger kids’ area is the unit’s gym, really no more than a concrete room. The drop ceiling’s yellow-stained tiles gave way during a hard rain last summer. Without the incentive of playtime in a functional gym, there’s little for the East Side staff to hold over kids’ heads as a reward for doing homework. LaBarrie admits that she takes it easy on her members, lest they stop coming. “Poor East Side,” LaBarrie says, poking out her bottom lip.
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LaBarrie is relatively new to the director’s position. The unit’s former director, Larry Lewis, left in November 2008 to take the director’s job at the Thornberry Unit; he says he wanted the challenge of running a much larger operation. The club’s administrators feared that the East Side kids would follow Lewis to Thornberry, with its huge gyms, posh play areas and newer feel.
But nobody did.
LaBarrie says her kids are fiercely loyal to the East Side, regardless of the soggy gym and frequent ant infestations. “It’s smaller, but that means they get more personal attention here,” she explains. “It’s not so easy to get lost in the shuffle.”
Outside, despite a biting wind, 16-year-old Rushad Hill shoots a basketball at a plastic goal with a shattered backboard in the lot behind the club. He’s the East Side Unit’s nominee for Youth of the Year. Every year, each of the five metro clubs chooses a kid to represent it in a citywide public-speaking contest. The metro winner goes on to compete statewide in Jefferson City, and this year’s state winner will travel to Atlanta, headquarters of the Boys & Girls Clubs, to compete for a chance to be named 2009 Youth of the Year. This year’s prize includes an introduction to President Barack Obama.
Rushad, his 17-year-old brother, Russell, and his 15-year-old sister, Rasheena, have been coming to the East Side Unit since it opened in 2004. They and their four older brothers used to live in the neighborhood. The three youngest siblings were lured to the club by a step-dancing exhibition that was held there. They joined as regular members, and though the family has moved from this neighborhood to one farther south, the Hill siblings still get rides to the East Side Unit every day after school. In his Youth of the Year speech, Rushad will talk about how he’s thankful to the Boys & Girls Clubs for being an after-school sanctuary. Not all his friends are angels, and a few times he was tempted to go down the wrong path. When he quit hanging out with a group of fair-weather friends who were bad influences, they taunted him, saying he’d wind up no better than three of his brothers serving prison sentences.
Now he’s a junior at Imagine Renaissance Academy for Environmental Science and Math, with plans to go to college and study electrical engineering.
Under the busted hoop, two younger kids beg Rushad for a pass. Rushad grabs his own rebound and shoots again, this time knocking another plastic splinter from the top of the broken goal. He tosses the ball to one of the boys.
Meanwhile, a half-dozen preteen kids hurl candy-colored dodge balls at one another in the gym’s confined space. One corner of the concrete gym is piled high with broken panels from last summer’s ceiling collapse.
Mark Trammel, a 25-year-old Boys & Girls Clubs employee, plays referee from his perch on a wooden desk pushed against one wall.
“I used to get depressed because I’d spend time in the other clubs and I could see how the interior, the nicer space, affects the kids’ mentality,” Trammel says. He points to a plastic-coated wire sticking out of the ceiling. “You won’t see that at any other club. No wires hanging. Every single tile in this ceiling would be bright-white.”
The tone of Trammel’s voice grows wistful. “I can’t wait to see the looks on the kids’ faces when they first walk into the new building and realize: This is our club.”
Trammel is referring to the future East Side Unit, the building that has been the centerpiece of a capital campaign called “Dreams to Reality,” which will transform Minute Circle into the J.D. Wagner Boys & Girls Club. (Namesakes Jean and Don Wagner, two longtime benefactors, made a significant contribution to the East Side project. Don Wagner is a private investor and a trustee at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; he and Jean also have a charitable foundation in their name.)
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Rushad Hill can’t wait. A basketball court to rival Thornberry’s is in the plans, along with a pool, a weight room and a stage.
“It was supposed to be ready last year, though,” Rushad says. “There have been a lot of deadlines.”
Forgive Joyce and Rachel Riley, neighborhood activists with the 24th Street Political Action Committee, if they refuse to muster much excitement over the Boys & Girls Clubs’ promises of a new East Side location. The 64130 zip code is ground zero for grandstanding politicians and their pledges to help. But after an election year, promises always seem to get pushed aside for bigger projects: a downtown arena, a water park in the Northland. Promises don’t do much for the Rileys anymore.
“We’re very grateful for everything they’ve done,” Rachel Riley says of the Boys & Girls Clubs. There’s a weary edge in her voice. The mother and activist, in her early 40s, is a well-known face in the neighborhood. In 2003, two groups of men — boys, really — fought for control of these cracked sidewalks. The streets became so rough that people were afraid to leave their houses at night. When Rachel organized “take back the night”-style marches, neighbors stared though their windows at her as though she’d lost her mind. Eventually, though, people joined her, believing they could exorcise the evils from their streets with gospel songs and candles.
She doesn’t march as much anymore, but she keeps the neighborhood mindful of 2003’s carnage.
On this day, she strides across the empty field that faces the former Minute Circle building on 24th Street. Over one shoulder, she carries a black trash bag filled with 24 white wooden crosses. Her other hand grips the hammer that will drive them into the earth.
Twenty-two of these 18-inch-tall crosses are for the young black men from this neighborhood who were killed within a 10-block radius of this field in 2003.
The 23rd cross is for Erica Green, the little girl once known as Precious Doe, whose headless body was found in a park in 2001.
The 24th cross is for Rachel’s son, killed in the crossfire of 2003.
Over her head, police cameras watch from white boxes affixed to light poles. The street is quiet except for occasional bass thumps erupting from passing cars.
When she first put up these crosses, Rachel says, no one messed with them. They stayed in place until just the other night, when “someone had a good ol’ time,” she says, joyriding across the field, leaving arcs of tire tracks and flattening a handful of the little monuments. She figured it was about time to repaint them and spruce up the fake flowers that she had attached to each one.
The grass in the field is brown and damp from the previous day’s rain, and the crosses sink in with just a few hammer thwacks.
“What kept this community together was Minute Circle,” Rachel says, glancing up at the building across the street, its boarded windows marked with fresh graffiti. “The Boys & Girls Clubs — we’re so grateful to have them, for them to give some hope to these kids. But Minute Circle provided for everyone, young and old.”
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Rachel and her mother, Joyce, urged the Minute Circle board to sell the building to the Boys & Girls Clubs instead of the Guadalupe Center in 2004. But Rachel says the neighborhood is still waiting for the charity to make good on its promises.
“The kids were supposed to be here last December,” Rachel says, pointing her hammer in the direction of Minute Circle. The club’s kids were told last year that they’d be celebrating Christmas 2008 in their new building, she says.
Joyce, who is on the steering committee for Dreams to Reality, says the original target goal for fundraising was $2 million. Then the number changed to $3.6 million. The board decided to tack other projects onto the campaign — an additional $1.75 million for guttering and landscaping at the Wyandotte County Unit and $150,000 in administrative costs to run the campaign itself.
Today, the total project cost is $5.5 million. The board requires that 80 percent be in hand before construction at Minute Circle can begin.
To drum up donations, the Dreams to Reality information packet includes crime statistics from the East Side Unit’s neighborhood and a photo of Rachel’s 24 crosses.
“Everyone milks the East Side to get their grants and funding,” Rachel says. “The statistics of how bad it is, how many shootings and murders — they get money from how bad the East Side is. The more the East Side is down, the more money they get. Momma’s gone so far as to say, ‘Give us the building back. The money you got, it’s our money.'”
David Smith, the president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City for the past 15 years, doesn’t mind the Rileys’ criticism. “I appreciate them,” he says. “I think they appreciate my situation, too. They know I’m not going to lie to them. They know I’m not going anywhere. I understand the tension around the need being so great and the urgency of the matter. I feel it as much as anybody.”
Smith is more comfortable in a sweater than in a suit. He has the warm smile of a coach and the tall frame of a basketball player — years ago, Central High School’s hoops earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Smith has overseen the completion of two major club renovations, one at Thornberry and one at the Wyandotte County Unit. Each took five years. The board first started discussing a new East Side Unit five years ago, he says. The way he sees it, things aren’t far behind schedule.
On the other hand, he says, if kids like Rushad Hill are counting on a January 2010 opening date, they might be disappointed.
“We know it’s a 10- or 12-month construction period from the start,” Smith says. “I’m sure that date, at some point, was put out there as a hopeful, but until we start, we won’t know when we’ll finish.”
He says the amount of money that the club hoped to raise for the East Side did increase, as the Rileys say, but only once.
“When we first undertook the effort to start raising money, we were trying to do it very quickly and without a lot of pomp and circumstance,” Smith says. “My board got more involved and determined that we needed to include some other funding issues in a broader campaign. You can probably understand that if you’re going to go out and ask for money for a special deal, you better have everything in there that you want.”
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So the figure became $5.5 million, including the first three years of the East Side Unit’s operating costs. The board wouldn’t want to build a brand-new club and not be able to afford to run it, he says. Smith says the project is $650,000 short of the 80 percent needed to get started.
“We’d really love to start here in the next 60 days, and that would give us a spring of 2010 opening,” Smith says.
The money for the East Side Unit is banked, not invested, Smith adds, so it’s not vulnerable to the sinking stock market.
The recession has forced the club to streamline operations, leaving some open positions unfilled and freezing raises for the past two years. His own salary is frozen, he says, at $172,000.
Back in 2002, when the Thornberry renovation was under way, Smith recalls how costs jumped when construction crews dug for a foundation and hit limestone. Undertaking another capital campaign in the middle of a worldwide financial crisis is like hitting another rock.
The day of the Youth of the Year competition opens with gunfire. A bullet, fired from a passing car, hits a 16-year-old boy waiting for a school bus at 24th Street and Elmwood, across the street from Minute Circle. Struck in the hand, he runs home to get a ride to the hospital.
A few blocks east, no one at the East Side Unit is particularly rattled. No one there knows the injured boy.
Rushad wrote his Youth of the Year speech the night before and practiced it once for his mom. She can’t watch him compete tonight because she’ll be at work, driving a Metro bus. Rushad’s dad is recovering from shoulder surgery and can’t attend, either. But Rasheena and Russell will be there to root for their brother.
By 6 p.m., guests have begun to fill the lobby of the Thornberry Unit, where circular tables have been set up around the foot of the club’s stage.
Rushad sits slouched at a table onstage with his four rivals, all girls. Each of these students hope to attend college, so the table represents two trends: that girls are outperforming boys in school, and that black boys are underrepresented in higher education. According to a 2006 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies report that used 2004 data, black men represented 7.9 percent of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds but made up only 2.8 percent of undergraduate enrollments in each state’s largest university.
Rushad’s electrical engineering ambitions, then, make him a standout among the standouts of the Boys & Girls Clubs.
Rushad leaves the stage to greet Russell and Trammel before the program begins. He has just heard that each speaker will have only two minutes. When he rehearsed it, his speech took four minutes. “I’m going to have to freestyle,” Rushad says.
After a dinner of chicken, green beans and macaroni and cheese catered by the Peachtree Restaurant, the contestants approach the podium. The four judges are Jean Leosh from the local General Mills plant; Marcus Forte, director of operations at Genesis School; A’Yanna Webster, founder of a nonprofit called Winning Within; and John Winnett, vice president of development, marketing and PR for the Boys & Girls Clubs.
Rushad speaks third, following a teary girl from Independence’s Hawthorne Unit and a nervous member from the Leslie Unit, also in Independence, who forgets her speech midway and abruptly sits back down. He approaches the microphone with a bounce in his step.
He talks about growing up as a middle child. The staff of his Boys & Girls Club gave him attention that was hard to get at home. His voice is steady and assertive as he quotes Booker T. Washington: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”
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But after a strong start, Rushad stumbles, shuffling through his notes and pausing too long. He cuts his speech short, thanks the judges and returns to his chair.
He’s followed by Mikheala Hill (no relation), a statuesque girl with jutting cheekbones and enormous heart-shaped earrings. The 16-year-old introduces herself with contagious cheerfulness, then talks about her commitment to “doing right” and working as a mentor for younger members. The judges don’t take long to name her the winner.
As Mikheala poses for pictures with her family and Smith, happy tears shining on her cheeks, Rushad pulls on his backpack and stands with Russell and Rasheena. He’s indifferent to the loss — he only just realized that the winner will have to keep presenting the same speech at each level of the competition. Speechmaking really isn’t his thing.
Shooting hoops, hanging out with friends, coaching the littlest kids — that’s his thing. He has another year and a half before he outgrows the Boys & Girls Clubs. If construction on the J.D. Wagner Unit starts soon, Rushad might get to enjoy shooting baskets at a goal with a backboard that doesn’t rain plastic splinters.
Like Rachel Riley’s crosses, one promise kept in this neighborhood stands for a long time.
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