Making a Comeback for Kids

Long before the latest national economic slowdown, this industrial town, where General Motors was founded a century ago, started to face tough times.

Flint has lost more than 80,000 auto-manufacturing jobs since the 1980s, as domestic carmakers trimmed the size of their staffs and moved jobs overseas. The local unemployment

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES Focus on providing services that meet a critical community need. Build a board comprised solely of members willing to commit both time and money to the cause. Develop an image and culture emphasizing hard work and frugality, to build trust with donors. Show donors where and how money is being spent, and where it is still needed. Seek donations outside of a struggling community; build relationships with wealthy or prominent townspeople who have moved away.

rate is nearly twice the national average. The increasingly impoverished city some 60 miles northwest of Detroit now has more than its share of blighted neighborhoods, violent crime, and troubled schools.

But such ills seem far away at the city’s 10-year-old Boys & Girls Club of Greater Flint, a branch of the national children’s charity whose goal is to provide a “positive place for kids.”

The scrubbed halls ring with the sound of young voices, as some 200 kids — age 7 to 17 — move boisterously between rooms that offer bumper pool, art instruction, basketball, and other activities. Thirty youngsters in matching fluorescent green T-shirts jostle eagerly near the club entrance — bound for a field trip to a mini-golf course, with ice cream to follow.

Five years ago, this club was all but defunct. Mired in debt, the charity ceased serving kids, released its employees, and existed only as a handful of board members earnestly debating whether their hardscrabble city could support a Boys & Girls Club.

But as Flint’s cash-strapped school system began to cut after-school programs, and the juvenile crime rate began to grow, the club’s board came to one conclusion: They had to try again.

Back on Track

Today, more than 1,300 Flint kids belong to the Boys & Girls Club, which is open five days a week in summer, and most afternoons and evenings during the school year (when homework often comes before the fun and games). It costs families only $10 a year per child to join.

The charity has a $700,000 annual budget and owns a 33,000-square-foot building that has received more than $1-million worth of improvements. The group’s most recent annual campaign exceeded its $150,000 goal by $15,000, and the charity has been adding to its $400,000 endowment.

“The Flint club has done a great job getting back on the right track,” says Ken Rubin, regional service director in the Chicago office of Boys & Girls Clubs of America. He says his charity has “identified a couple of key components to successful organizations and they’re pretty straightforward: strong executive leadership, and strong boards with good board leadership. Those things were not in place in Flint before.”

Local charities have it tough, says Kathi Horton, president of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. “A whole lot of nonprofits in the Flint area are struggling and very few are operating from a base of strength,” she says. “The Boys & Girls Club has a strong combination of very effective leadership and successfully meeting a critical community need.”

“Those guys just hustle,” she adds. “They work every angle and don’t just wait for opportunities to come to them.”

Blue-Collar Ethics

It’s not hard to spot the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Flint’s executive director, Jamie Gaskin, when he walks the club’s halls. The six-foot-three native of upstate Michigan towers over his young charges. The kids greet him with smiles and hugs. “I don’t know all of them but they all know me,” Mr. Gaskin says.

He says most of his charity’s success can be ascribed to one thing: its adoption of the same blue-collar work ethic Flint residents have long demonstrated.

“When you are seen as working just as hard as the small businesses that are struggling to get by, you earn respect,” he says. “And there is an incredible amount of support there for you.”

Just that morning, Mr. Gaskin says, he restocked the club’s vending machines — not the typical duty of an executive director.

The club has also boldly sought, and received, a lot of financial support from outside the economically struggling town. And there was what he calls a little “pixie dust” involved in how he came to lead and revive the organization.

Mr. Gaskin, who never attended Boys & Girls Clubs as a child, was exposed to them in 1995 in Lansing, Mich., through the AmeriCorps Volunteers in Service to America program, a federal effort that helps recent college graduates pay off school loans by working at nonprofit groups.

He loved the experience, and the charity became his career. “I’ve worked every job at Boys & Girls Clubs, in some real good organizations over a 10-year period of time, and have a lot of experience seeing what works and what doesn’t work,” he says.

Mr. Gaskin was director of services and programs at the Appleton, Wis., Boys & Girls Club six years ago when his wife’s job prompted them to move to Flint. And it just happened that the real-estate agent showing the couple apartments in their new town was on the board of Flint’s shuttered Boys & Girls Club. Mr. Gaskin jumped on the challenge of restarting the club.

Meanwhile, the board was engaging in some painful self-analysis.

“There was some dead wood on the board — people who were there because being on the board made them look good,” says Lottie Ferguson, a board member since 2002 who now serves as its vice president. “We needed to find people serious about investing their time and their money in supporting the club.”

Keeping It Simple

In 2003, with a $50,000 grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation, whose headquarters is here, and some $60,000 from Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Mr. Gaskin was hired and went to work, in a rented room with a hand-me-down computer.

His first task was to deal with the charity’s approximately $60,000 debt, largely owed to the Internal Revenue Service for late or unfiled documents, but also to some local merchants. Most of the businesses had already written off the money, Mr. Gaskin says, but he contacted them all anyway, offering at least partial payments.

“We did right by those people, and I think the community appreciated that,” he says.

Mr. Gaskin and the board also began to hammer out a strategic plan for moving the club forward. They had the help of a consultant provided though the Building Excellence, Sustainability and Trust (commonly known as BEST) program, a coalition of Flint foundations and charities, including the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, designed to help charities strengthen their operations.

“We all fund lots of programs, but very little money goes to operating support or capacity building,” says Ms. Horton of Flint’s community foundation. “We came to recognize that we are building weakness into the sector if we don’t make dollars available in these areas.”

In the end, Mr. Gaskin says, the Boys & Girls Club’s leaders had to be smart, but also keep things simple.

“In a community with a lot more wealthy donors, charities have a greater willingness to speculate or take risks,” Mr. Gaskin says. “We had to come in with really basic core services and programs for the kids, and then work really hard.”

One ambitious goal for the club that emerged from the planning efforts was acquiring a facility. It had earlier run kids’ programs out of leased space and a gymnasium shared with other organizations.

“It just did not impress people or donors,” Ms. Ferguson says of the old arrangement. “And if it’s not your own space, you can’t take a vested interest in it.”

In late 2003, the Flint school system sold the charity a surplus elementary-school building for $1. After Mr. Gaskin and volunteers spent many a night gutting and painting a few rooms, the club reopened in February 2004. By year’s end, 800 kids were club members.

“Donors are more protective than they were 20 or 30 years ago, when organizations just kept getting checks,” Mr. Gaskin says. “Now they want to see something tangible. We bring donors in here to let them see it is clean and well supervised.”

Building Relationships

Indeed, Mr. Gaskin says, the charity takes every opportunity to mix kids and donors within the club building. When the club’s art room opened, donors and children marked the occasion with painted handprints along one wall. The club’s largest fund-raising event, a steak-and-burger dinner sponsored by the Outback Steakhouse chain, is catered at the club, with donors paying $50 a plate to eat alongside club members. (“We have to coach the kids a little bit on how to behave,” Mr. Gaskin says with a grin.)

The dinner raises around $20,000, but the charity leader sees it doing much more than that.

“It’s all about building relations with individual donors,” he says. “Then, when the annual-fund letter comes, maybe we get a $1,000 check. Maybe when their business has an opportunity to give back in the community, we come to mind.”

The charity soon learned that even its struggling factory town is home to wealthy individuals willing to invest in, as Mr. Gaskin describes it, “the future of Flint.” One anonymous local donor has given the club more than $100,000.

The club also learned the value of reaching out to prominent people who grew up in Flint but have since moved away.

Patrick McInnis, a Flint native and president of Rock Financial and Quicken Loans, large national lenders in Livonia, Mich., contacted the club in 2006 about a small program to help teach kids financial skills. Mr. Gaskin kept in touch with Mr. McInnis following this effort, keeping him abreast of club developments — and needs. Through this relationship, the club was connected with Deanna Nolan, another Flint native and star of the Detroit Shock women’s professional basketball team.

Last summer, Rock Financial and the Nolan Foundation, in Detroit, teamed up to provide $100,000 to open the Rock and Shock center, where the club’s older members can enjoy the latest video games, computers, and stereo equipment.

Through his high-school baseball coach, the club tracked down another Flint native, Jim Abbott, the retired, one-handed Major League Baseball pitcher who now lives in Los Angeles and works as a globe-trotting motivational speaker. After learning about the club — and its summertime baseball program — Mr. Abbott now gives the charity a portion of the money he makes signing memorabilia across the country.

“We just learned that the head of one the largest hedge funds is a Flint native,” Mr. Gaskin says. “We need to find someone who has a relationship with him, someone who knows the family.”

About a third of the club’s former school building has yet to be renovated for use. Mr. Gaskin hopes to add a health department with exercise gear and eventually to be able to accommodate 350 kids at a time. After that, the organization will need to branch out to another location.

“Flint needs three Boys & Girls Clubs,” Mr. Gaskin says. “I want 1,000 kids to have a safe place to be.”

Meanwhile, the club’s leadership keeps “hustling” after opportunities to tell its tale and solicit support.

“Taking care of the dollar and taking care of the donor — that’s our blue-collar approach,” says Mark Serra, the club’s development director. “We’re not encumbered with 50 years of doing something a certain way.”