A CEO Plans to Update and ‘Professionalize’ a Venerable Youth Charity

Felix A. Urrutia Jr. points to a large gold-framed canvas hanging on one wall of his office as head of the

Police Athletic League. The painting, which shows a 1940s-era police officer wrapping his arms around the narrow shoulders of a blond boy and an auburn-haired girl, is the iconic image of the 90-year-old New York organization.

For Mr. Urrutia, who was appointed executive director in October, it also represents the challenge of adapting the youth charity’s mission while maintaining respect for its history.

He hopes to hire a muralist to decorate a second wall with an updated image, one that will reflect the ethnic diversity of the charity’s young participants as well as the wide range of programs it now offers.

Once a recreation organization, the Police Athletic League has expanded into education, youth employment, child care, and other fields in recent decades.

“We need to develop a new image and a new identity,” says Mr. Urrutia, 42. “It’s not just about cops anymore. The vast majority of people who work with our kids are artists, teachers, recreation professionals, poets, moms, and dads, who have second jobs.”

Mr. Urrutia, who will make $135,000 in the position, was hired in large part because he had a specific vision for moving the charity forward, says Robert J. McGuire, president of the board. After spending eight years in two previous positions at the league, Mr. Urrutia impressed recruiters by arriving at interviews carrying copies of an extensive business plan.

His ideas for “professionalizing” the organization, which employs 150 full-time workers (and about twice as many part-timers) and serves about 70,000 children each year, include developing new ways to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and recruiting more-experienced employees.

He will also attempt to expand the charity’s efforts to raise money from private sources. Currently, it receives $21-million of its $27-million annual budget from government agencies.

The job is Mr. Urrutia’s first permanent executive-director post. He has served as interim leader of the Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens, where he helped to refurbish the charity’s crumbling facility and to attract new staff members.

Before that, he led the reopening of the Police Athletic League’s New South Bronx Center, the largest of the charity’s 24 full-time sites.

An intense, athletic man who once dreamed of playing center field for the New York Mets, Mr. Urrutia will draw on his experience growing up in a low-income neighborhood similar to communities where the Police Athletic League works.

The only son of Puerto Rican immigrants, he grew up playing stickball and baseball on the Lower East Side, about a half-mile from the charity’s East 12th Street office building.

“There isn’t a single resident in any of these communities we serve who can say to me I don’t understand. Like heck I don’t understand,” says Mr. Urrutia. “I’m a product of these communities.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, he discussed his charity’s future.

What are your goals for the organization?

We have the perfect chance now to examine our organization from top to bottom. We are going to look at all personnel, programs, facilities, and fund-raising strategies.

One thing we haven’t been good at is evaluating our programs. We are going to move from anecdotal evaluation to empirical evaluation.

We are examining our mission. Our mission talks about serving inner-city kids in underprivileged neighborhoods. We don’t want to speak that language anymore.

Every community has deficits and every community has assets. Instead, we are focusing on the kids. Our targeted kids are those we consider in most need of structured programs.

One thing we’re doing now is dealing a lot more with kids in trouble with the law.

We are bringing them in and working with the criminal-justice system. The police and Legal Aid are referring kids to us so we can incorporate them into our programs.

In some cases they need food and shelter and they are not connected with schools. Others, we are trying to get them jobs.

We also need to professionalize ourselves in terms of the people we are recruiting.

We want to create an agency of appropriate models for kids. Whether it’s the administrative assistant, center director, maintenance person, they all should model appropriate behavior so our kids are surrounded by people who are working, may have attended college, are thinking about their careers and futures. That’s going to take some discipline because the demand for jobs in these communities is so great.

Sometimes we have hired someone with less education because they are from the communities. We are going to start saying no to that.

Do you expect any backlash from people in the community?

There will be those who will be upset, who will say, “You owe us and you have to give us jobs.”

But we’re going to reiterate our mission and our values. It’s about the mission of the Police Athletic League, not about individual needs.

Do you expect to add any new programs?

The funding world is looking for new things every day. They are asking for organizations like the Police Athletic League, which is traditionally a recreation and socialization organization, to do far more in the academic arena.

So we are doing far more in terms of academics. Every single one of our members gets homework help, but we’re going to go deeper in the enrichment area. We will provide teachers to work with kids in a variety of academic settings. We’re also looking at health and fitness and childhood obesity.

Is it difficult to balance what grant makers want with the needs you see among children?

All the time, particularly with government.

Government research comes out of academic institutions, and statistics come out of Washington, D.C. People get together and they say the next area of focus is childhood obesity. If you aren’t a nonprofit that can create and invent, you are left out in the dark.

What we want to do that I believe is different than what we’ve done in the past is go to government and foundations from a position of strength and say this is who we are and these are our core values.

We would like government to respond a little more to the nonprofit sector. The funders cannot exist without the service providers. That’s a relationship we need to start talking a lot more about.