MOMENTen Festival
Ten Years. Over 3 Million Moments. Help Make Millions More...
Each of us are still waiting for moments in our lives that have yet to be realized. For some, these dreams include getting married, having a baby or buying the home you will raise your family in. If you are like me at all, you also grew up with a dream of making a difference in the world by helping bring life-changing moments to the lives of others.
This year, Boy With a Ball is giving you the holiday gift of an opportunity; an opportunity to see that dream come true. By helping us reach our goal of raising $55,000 you are joining the fight to reach the heart of young people and their families. Donate now.
Join us November 28th - December 9th as we post photos and memories throughout the day for a ten-day celebration on our Facebook page. We want to make sure that you have ample opportunity to be part of this incredible work. Join our Facebook Cause and get even more involved in providing life-changing moments to hundreds upon hundreds of young people.
Not only will the Facebook page be posting regular updates, but also the timeline below will reveal new stories each day, taking you step by step through the development of impacting youth through long lasting relationships. Learn a bit about where we've come from, the lives that have been touched over the last ten years, and the intense battle going on for the lives of young people across the globe.
It All Started Here:
One Thursday night in 1998 Justin Kuravackal and his wife Kate, school teachers and recent Trinity University graduates, asked Jamie and Kathy Johnson if they could get together once a week as a sort of "accountability group." As the couples met together and got to know one another, something magical happened and the times developed a life of their own. After a while, Kate asked if she could invite her college roommate, Beth Hough (Hernandez now!) and from there the group was off and running. Within a year, a dynamic group of between 16 and 60 young leaders filled the Johnson's living room all yearning to grow in their faith, in their friendship and in their ability to make a difference. One night, a picture of a missing child was being passed around and Jamie Johnson realized something special had happened. Almost ten years earlier, he had been a young youth pastor struggling to help young people in Orlando, Florida when he sensed God gave him a vision of building a team of supernaturally gifted youth workers like the "League of Superheroes" who could combine to see a city's youth population be transformed. Now, the team appeared to have formed right there in that apartment living room! And with that, Boy With a Ball was born.
BWAB Team Member #1: Beth Hernandez
One of Boy With a Ball's first team members and one of the young leaders who was there the night the picture of the missing child was passed around that first college group, Beth Hernandez (formerly Hough) was a Trinity University graduate and a middle school teacher on San Antonio's west side. Beth lives and cares for people in a way that transforms their lives and this was certainly true of her back then. Beth's dramatic faith and her capacity to love people drew one student after another into a small group she helped start across the street. Beth drew many other students into her heart and her life in a way that changed their hearts and lives. Beth also introduced Boy With a Ball to her father, a chaplain at the Medina Annex of Lackland Airforce Base which led to BWAB beginning an outreach called Synergy in 2002. Beth met Thomas Hernandez around Boy With a Ball and went on to marry him. Jamie often says that the first Boy With a Ball team was built on the back of Beth's powerful capacity to love and connect with young people and the stories that her life produced on a week to week basis.
BWAB Team Member #2 & 3: John and Candace McCarter
John and Candace McCarter first met the Johnsons and Beth at Camp of Champions Mississippi and became good friends over the years. When Jamie began talking to John, a former youth pastor, about the possibility of forming a team like the League of Superheroes to reach and develop young people, John responded swiftly and he, Candace and their two girls moved to San Antonio in early 2001. The McCarters are and were specialists in meeting people and drawing them into friendships. They led a small group of BWAB team members at their house alongside Beth and the Sartors and they led the Synergy outreach on the Medina Annex of Lackland Airforce Base. Their generosity and warm hearts and hospitality drew BWAB team members to their house several times a week to watch a Spurs game together or to have a BWAB Game Night. It is safe to say that without their investment in Boy With a Ball, the team would never have made it through those first years.
BWAB Team Member #4: Christy Wooten
Pictured here with fellow BWAB team member Jamie Johnson as they were about to be honored in a west side parade, Christy Wooten was a huge piece to Boy With a Ball's first year. Christy was a University of Texas graduate and her work as a social worker fit in perfectly with the other team members. "Wooten," as the team called her, helped BWAB with our work to support El Placazo, a student-led newspaper on San Antonio's west side and she also led BWAB into helping with a low income housing complex on the city's east side where she worked. Wooten's time with the team was short but she was a great strength to a young team trying to figure out what it meant to work together to reach and develop young people.
Matt Sartor Playing With Children in COC Mississippi Outreach
To be fair and to be clear, the early years of Boy With a Ball were no walk in the park. After a beginning with tremendous enthusiasm, reality had set in by the early months of 2001 and brought with it a good amount of humiliation and desperation. 2002 started off with a growing number of individuals who, while watching our pathetic beginnings and probably laughing nervously, suddenly found themselves sensing that they too were called to join the team. Things often seemed disjointed. Opportunities to make a difference would arise and a small group of us would find a chance to respond but we often yearned for a chance to all serve in one setting together as a team. Camp of Champions Mississippi proved a great place to do this. Newer BWABallers like Matt Sartor here were able to serve and care for young people as part of the Boy With a Ball team while also adding some of our newly developing outreach skills and experience to help expand the camps into new areas.
Lauren Sartor and Beth Hernandez Together With Girls at COC Mississippi
Lauren Sartor and Beth Hernandez, seen here at COC MS again, were among a growing group of dynamic young women finding their place together in the team. In 2002, tensions, insecurities, misunderstandings and all of the other symptoms of a team going through the "conflict stage" were sometimes pretty evident but the team members were also beginning to see some of the promise and possibilities of "clicking" together and learning to work as a team. Phrases like, "It's not as important to know where you are going as it is to know who you are going with," were often spoken of and deep friendships were forming.
Matt Sartor and Kathy Johnson Goofing Around Together
Another key part of 2002 and the early Boy With a Ball team was silliness and humor. When you put people like Matt Sartor, John McCarter, Thomas Hernandez, Kathy Johnson and others who came later like James Williams and Ryan Quiroz together, the results were hilarious and sometimes damaging to furniture. Laughing to the point of crying was a constant and ridiculous situations seemed to flow freely. Ask any of these early Boy With a Ballers for a funny story or two from this time and they will almost certainly give you a dozen. Perhaps the pain of becoming something made laughing and humor a welcome escape. Perhaps these guys were just really funny. Looking back at 2002, we were having the time of our lives and learning to reach and help young people while we did it.
Boy With a Ballers Surrounded By Future BWAB Stars at COC Texas Camp At the Frio River
Camp of Champions Texas was started by Boy With a Ball in partnership with Christ Covenant Church in Houston, Texas and that first year saw Boy With a Ball staffers surrounded by many faces that would go on to play prominent roles in the organization's future. Seated here around Jamie and Kathy Johnson and Cindy Chen, you can see a young Anna Currie, just a few months into being worked with by BWAB team members. Anna is now the Executive Director for Boy With a Ball San Antonio. Also in the photo, you will see Katie Williams (formerly Hyatt) who was an intern with BWAB Costa Rica in 2010 and who married long time BWAB team member James Williams this past August. As the team was forming, much of the love and life that they were investing was flowing into young leaders who would go on to great things for Boy With a Ball!
And Then There Was Knight School
2003 is the year that everything changed for Boy With a Ball. So much of the relational foundation set in 2001 and the steady, small steps of learning to work with young people together in 2002 came together in a significant way in 2003. A strong team that included the McCarters, Thomas and Beth Hough Hernandez (not yet married at the time!), Matt and Lauren Sartor, Sam Chen and his future wife Cindy who was the first non-local team member, Luke Ture, the Johnsons, Chris Mora, Melissa McCarty, Veronica Martell and others had come together and still others like Ryan Quiroz, Peter and Missy Watts and more would join the team by the end of the year. James Williams and Anna Currie both moved to San Antonio to be involved and joined the team within a few months. Magen Wilson Quiroz was an ever-increasing presence within the team as well, traveling from Mobile regularly.
As the team flourished and began to be known around the US, an idea came up for an event called "Gladiator School" that later was changed to be called Knight School. Knight School was a pretty radical mini-conference that attracted nearly 30 young leaders from across the US. It mixed a steady flow of life-changing teaching about how to live lives of faith, opportunities to put what we were learning into practice in connecting with people across the city and even a day trip to Mexico to work in teams to see who could make the biggest difference in the hours allotted. Think Amazing Race mixed with eating Jalapenos and trying to love and build friendships with people. At the end of the conference, much of the team went skydiving. Needless to say, the event was life-changing and unforgettable.
An Amazing Group of People In and Around the Forming Boy With a Ball Team
It is important to point out as you see these pictures of Gabriela Gaytan Royal and Ana Cawthon Wells that a pretty large group of amazing people flowed through and around the team in these early years who never joined the Boy With a Ball team. They loved, grew, served, participated, shared their hearts but never sensed that they were supposed to go any further than that. This precedent has gone on to be one of the great parts of working with Boy With a Ball. Gabriela and Ana both had lived in the Johnson's Seven Bedroom House and both had worked for Jamie a few years prior.
Two Stars Are Born: Mentoring and Small Groups
This picture of the Johnsons with Magen Wilson Quiroz and Anna Currie in front of their apartment brings up the critical place that meeting together in small group meetings and mentoring relationships played in these years. It has gone on to be central to how the organization works. Young leaders were given time to process through their pasts, their present issues and their pursuit of their individual life purposes both in talking with couples like the McCarters, Sartors, Johnsons, Beth Hough Hernandez and Thomas Hernandez and they were also given the chance to sit around and discuss these same things in the midst of other young people like them. This led to a dramatic level of support and care for each leader which helped them to grow and to see their lives change.
Growing Groups Led to Love Feasts
This sounds a bit racy but as Boy With a Ball team members saw small groups growing quickly, it became difficult to multiply them into small groups without inventing monthly Love Feasts where all team members and group attendees could come together for a barbecue. These events were not the only invention of the time. Team members also flocked to Game Nights at the McCarters and different apartments.
Boy With a Ball Launches Into San Jose, Costa Rica
From the very beginning, Boy With a Ball team members had been talking about learning to help young people not only in the US but across the world. Jamie and Kathy Johnson had a strong desire to move to Latin America and establish a Boy With a Ball team there in order to help young people on the streets, teen prostitutes and families living in poverty. Over the early years of Boy With a Ball, many of the other team members also cared deeply for helping Latin American youth. With this in mind, the Johnsons, Jody Lundy, Matt and Lauren Sartor and Ryan and Magen Quiroz began meeting once a month in order prepare for going as a team to San Jose, Costa Rica. In January of 2004, the Johnsons moved their family to Moravia, a small town on the northeast side of San Jose. Jody Lundy was escorted down to CR by the Sartors and Quirozes in March and then the Sartors moved to Costa Rica in August of that year. Cindy Chen became BWAB's Office Administrator based back in the States and served sacrificially to keep us all afloat.
Sorting Out Who Would Go To Costa Rica
Year one in Costa Rica for the departing team was filled with massive levels of culture shock, a wild sense of adventure and trying to help each team member settle into life in San Jose. As this was happening, Ryan and Magen Quiroz were getting married and then having to decide whether and when they would come to CR. Our team in Costa Rica was also learning that what had happened with us all in the US was an important foundation but that Boy With a Ball would have to change radically to become effective in Latin America. This process put tremendous strain on relationships within the team and began to show us that the future of BWAB CR would need to be in the hands of Costa Rican leaders as soon as possible. As a result of all of these wranglings, Ryan and Magen made a decision to stay in Mobile, Alabama and eventually Ryan headed off to law school.
Boy With a Ball Southside Continues Growing
Chris and Kelli Mora were also married in 2004 and they continued to invest their lives in young people across the south side of San Antonio, where Chris had grown up. The Mora's passionate heart for south side young people and families and their capacity to invest in them produced a constant flow of fruit. Young people's lives were changing and the BWAB Southside team was growing and learning.
Boy With a Ball In Transition
By 2004, Boy With a Ball was attracting a decent amount of attention and many young leaders were showing interest in being involved. Some interest had been shown for starting teams in Houston, in Mobile and in Atlanta, Georgia. Thomas and Beth Hernandez, Fred and Charlotte Vigil, Chris and Kelli Mora and many others continued growing in the US and sensed a strong connection to Boy With a Ball. Yet it became clear that for Boy With a Ball to become what it would need to be we would need to delineate a difference between a growing community of followers of Jesus who deeply loved one another and cared about young people and Boy With a Ball as a strong healthy not-for-profit. This was a painful moment of pruning and change but it has paved the way for so much of what Boy With a Ball has become and for so many good things for everyone involved.
Anna Currie Arrives In Costa Rica
In January of 2005 Anna Currie arrived in Costa Rica to participate in a study abroad program. Anna's capacity to learn language quickly, to acculturate, and to build relationship with Costa Ricans brought a new factor into the BWAB Costa Rica team. Anna would end up spending the next six years living in CR and became El Niño y La Bola's second executive director. She is now the executive director of BWAB San Antonio.
Jose (Chicky) Arias Emerges
After first meeting Chicky Arias in 2004, Jamie and Kathy Johnson began mentoring Chicky and much of 2005 was filled with opportunities to walk with him into his development as a young Costa Rican leader. Chicky would go on to become El Niño y La Bola's Team Leader and Executive Director and one of Boy With a Ball's strongest leaders.
The Decision to Stay In Costa Rica
Boy With a Ball's original idea was to go to Costa Rica for two years as a training ground for heading into Mexico City. The longer the team worked in Costa Rica, the clearer they could see Costa Rica's great need for development. In the fall of 2005, Jamie Johnson had a conversation with a key leader who advised the organization to stay put in Costa Rica and build the organization there.
The Work to Become a True Youth Development NGO
In 2005 BWAB's board of directors worked together with a non profit consultant named Ann Lundquist to transition the origination into becoming a strong youth development non govermental organization (NGO). This work included refining our mission statement and vision, defining our theory of change, and conducting an assessment of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Defining Boy With a Ball's Theory of Change
Boy With a Ball's work with outside non-profit consultants and with key team members like Missy Watts in San Antonio, Texas continued to facilitate our growth into being a full fledge, highly-effective not-for-profit organization with a strong board of directors, clear mission statement and vision and a better and better grasp of what it meant to reach and equip young people with greater and greater impact. Part of this work involved identifying what it was that Boy With a Ball teams and programs focused on in order to help young people and their families. In evaluating our best work over the first four years, the following core elements emerged:
Building Teams that could:
- constantly walk into young people's lives and neighborhoods through outreach
- through which we could build one-to-one mentoring relationships and
- developmental small groups where young people could be
- equipped and educated to grow to be healthy leaders capable of helping their communities.
International Interns Turbo Charge El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica
In the Fall of 2006, Joshua Woodruff (Omaha, Nebraska), Ruth Holbrook (Miami, Florida), Kathy Svoboda (Colorado Springs, Colorado) all came to San Jose, Costa Rica to be interns with Boy With a Ball. All of the interns lived within the BWAB dorm under the direction of Anna Currie and they began to work a rigorous schedule that included early mornings, late nights, long meetings and dramatic work including facing drug dealers, teen prostitutes, wealthy international school students and all the conflicts that come with living in the same facility with other young leaders. The presence of this team of interns provided a significant influx of labor as team members Matt and Lauren Sartor transitioned back to the U.S.
Beginning to Work In the El Triangulo Squatter's Settlement, Attracting Volunteers
After two years of occasionally participating in other group's programs at the El Triangulo de la Solidaridad squatter's settlement just north of downtown San Jose, Costa Rica, the BWAB team made the decision to focus our efforts into this "precario" where 3,000 lived on just three acres. In the beginning, much of our work was about doing ethnographic work to talk to residents and to hear their stories so that we could learn. As we learned, our next challenge was turning and equipping our staff to be able to find meaningful ways to reach out into the community and begin building friendships with the people. This work also included the organization's first work to develop volunteers from local churches, schools and universities. This focus on volunteers quickly became one of Boy With a Ball's most significant focuses.
Investing in Young People Across Costa Rica Including Street Kids, Teen Prostitutes, Equipping Churches and Lincoln International School
Beyond our work in the El Triangulo precario, Boy With a Ball also began initiating outreaches into San Jose's downtown streets in the middle of the night to reach and develop street kids and teen prostitutes and into local churches where we had significant capacity to help develop the churches to better equip their young people. After Jamie Johnson had a significant conversation with Lincoln School's Executive Director Jack Bimrose, Boy With a Ball was also invited to begin working on the campus of one of Costa Rica's most important private schools with a focus on reaching and developing the student's hearts.
Learning to Meet Urgent Needs Without Creating Dependency: Providing Dental Work and School Supplies
Two events occurred in January of 2007 that would change everything for the future of Boy With a Ball in Costa Rica. Early in the month, a group of dentists and support staff came down to San Jose from Kalamazoo, Michigan led by dentist Ed Liebenthal and engineer Tom Kasten. Within two days of arriving, this dental team had set up shop in the precario and went on to provide dental services for 109 people in just about five days. Families who had just begun to know the Boy With a Ball team and who were opening their hearts little by little to trusting our presence in the precario and in their lives were dramatically impacted by this amazing free gift. After watching their children cry themselves to sleep at night due to toothaches and cavities, they walked out of the make-shift clinic with tears in their eyes and a deep sense of connection with our team.
About this time, several families approached us about their children's need for school supplies in order to be able to keep their children in school. Due to the government's budget restraints, students in Costa Rica had to pay for a $100 of the supplies they would need for the year. Students from the precario, whose parents made only $200 a month, were often forced to drop out due to having no capacity to buy these supplies. Boy With a Ball put out a Facebook request for help and we were overwhelmed by the response. Funds came in for us to provide school supplies for nine or ten families and our team members were given the great joy of watching these families weep, shout and celebrate as we walked into their houses with the backpacks full of school uniforms, erasers, paper and notebooks. These two types of meeting urgent needs helped establish a policy for Boy With a Ball that we would look for every way we could serve and help the families we were working with in the community in ways, however, that were were sure to not create dependency. In this way, we were able to see families helped in practical ways that opened their hearts more and more to beginning mentoring relationships and joining small group communities where they could grow.
Focusing On the Development of Indigenous Leaders
As Boy With a Ball emerged as a legitimate international development organization, it didn't take long to look around and see that we were not the only group in Costa Rica looking to make a difference. One characteristic that we would see over and over again in the groups around us was their reliance on foreign staff members and the resulting lack of traction they had in seeing local leaders get involved. As we watched our own work with international staff, interns and volunteers, we realized that the more our work was filled with non-locals, the less effective it was and the less attractive it was to Costa Rican leaders. In other words, Costa Ricans were obviously much better equipped to reach and develop other Costa Ricans and we would need to make a focused effort on attracting and developing local, indigenous leaders to really achieve our mission. This began a multi-year transition in our work to pave the way for a day when each Boy With a Ball team would be indigenously led and, as a result, dramatically more effective.
The Work in the Precario Begins to Grow
Success of any kind requires consistent, mundane, unseen labor. Developing young people, their families and their communities is no different. As an organization, Boy With a Ball has learned to communicate the dramatic moments that fill people's eyes with tears and inspire their hearts but those moments are always the fruit of thousands of other uncomfortable, unremarkable instances filled with sweat, exhaustion, work and suffering in silence.
Week after week, Boy With a Ball worked through 2007 in the El Triangulo precario doing walkthrough after walkthrough, having conversation after conversation, developing relationship after relationship and having one mentoring moment or small group meeting after another. Much of the time, little progress could be seen at the moment. However, as 2007 continued, stories began to emerge of growth. Women who were a part of our women's group would talk of learning to be honest with their husbands even at the risk of being physically harmed. Young people began to tell stories of how they were overcoming poverty to stay in school and to stay away from high-risk behaviors. Families were changing. Hard choices were being made. Hearts were growing. The community was developing.
The Powerful Story of Raquel Henriquez Lanuza
No story from 2007 is any better than the story of Raquel Henriquez Lanuza, El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica's current Office Administrator. Our team had met Raquel and her family as they waited in line to receive dental work in January and had discovered that Raquel was the only high school graduate we had ever met in the precario, a community where the average level of education was only at a 3rd grade level. When we asked Raquel what she planned to do next, she answered calmly that her desire was to go to college. Immediately we directed the high school and college volunteers with us that day to build friendships with Raquel so that she would have the support she would need to accomplish her dream.
Over the months that followed, Raquel began to be mentored by team members and finally was offered a job to be the organization's Office Administrator with the hope that the job would provide her with the funding to go to school and a place for her to do her homework. Four years later, Raquel is now a scholarshiped student at the University of Costa Rica, a central leader for El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica and a community leader in the El Triangulo precario. Additionally, Raquel has become an important advocate in meeting with corporations, government officials and stakeholders to help people understand how slums and squatter's settlements can best be developed.
Boy With a Ball Global Emerges
Focusing on developing local leaders by bringing in a new group of international staff members might seem counterproductive but it is exactly what Boy With a Ball did in the first few months of 2008. Long-time friend and former Boy With a Ball team member James Williams from Atlanta, GA and Melody Strom-Currie, hired to be the organization's first Development Director, were responsible for guiding Boy With a Ball into developing partnerships with the local business community, international corporations, foundations and churches. Melody and James provided an immediate boost in Boy With a Ball's work with Lincoln School right as El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica was establishing its board of directors and receiving NGO status from the Costa Rican government. As a result, a new Boy With a Ball team was formed called the Boy With a Ball Global team whose focus would be to found, equip and support local Boy With a Ball organizations including El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica and any others that would form later.
Hiring Latin American Regional Director Josue Garcia Sarmiento
One critical piece to the concept of a Boy With a Ball Global team working was the need for a mature leader from Latin America to be hired who could travel and identify potential leaders, support their development and then help them establish themselves and their organization. Josue Garcia Sarmiento fit the bill perfectly. Josue is a talented teacher, speaker, equipper of local church pastors, musician and even a registered nurse. He was hired to work part time with Boy With a Ball and part time with Dr. Leroy Curtis to teach within his El Arbol Institute. Josue was an immediate hit and, after going full time with BWAB a year later, he has gone on to help us strengthen our work in Costa Rica while being the catalyst to our entry into Nicaragua in 2010. Additionally, Josue continues to identify potential future leaders that could pave our way into establishing Boy With a Ball teams in Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
Lincoln Camps Begin
In 2006, Jamie Johnson was on a plane with Jack Bimrose, the Executive Director of Lincoln School in San Jose, Costa Rica. Lincoln is one of the top three international schools in Costa Rica and attracts many of country's leaders' children. Mr. Bimrose asked what Boy With a Ball is and after Jamie explained, he asked why Boy With a Ball was not working at Lincoln School. Jamie explained that Boy With a Ball works with at-risk youth and that most Lincoln students were from wealthy families. Mr. Bimrose disagreed. "These Lincoln students need Boy With a Ball," he said, "because they are growing up in wealthy families who leave them to be raised by their maids and they are at risk of growing up to be the next generation of corrupt politicians if someone doesn't reach and develop their hearts."
In the following years Boy with a Ball began working with Lincoln in a variety of settings including Anna Currie coaching the girls basketball team and BWAB team members leading Lincoln's Community Service club. Their biggest collaboration began in 2008 as Boy With a Ball began planning and putting on all of Lincoln School's camps. During these camps, single grade levels hopped on buses and headed into the mountains to BWAB-selected campsites where Boy With a Ball staffers provided a leadership and youth development program that was tremendous fun for the students as well as being life-changing. Boy With a Ball continues to do these camps today and has seen hundreds of volunteers flow out of Lincoln and into our work in the precario.
A Motto Takes Hold: Working Ourselves Out of a Job
In the 1960's as Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society took hold and the United States began to invest in social programs to help alleviate poverty, racial segregation and other social ills, a phrase became popular among those directing these activities: Working ourselves out of a job. The idea within any kind of work to equip people to climb out of high risk behaviors and into healthy lives is that, if the work you are doing is effective, you shouldn't have to keep doing the same thing for very long. As people develop, they should no longer need your help and, if you do your job very well, many of those you have reached should take your place to turn and care for their own communities. In 2008, Boy With a Ball began to see that the quickly emerging El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica team would not need the BWAB Global team members around too much longer and plans began to emerge for working intentionally to equip the Costa Ricans to assume more and more responsibility. As this happened, BWAB Global leaders found themselves increasingly available to turn and begin working to develop Boy With a Ball organizations in additional countries.
Building the El Triangulo Community Center
As Boy With a Ball's work in the El Triangulo de la Solidaridad precario in San Jose, Costa Rica grew to impact larger and larger numbers of young people and families, the team faced a significant crisis. BWAB always had the use of a small building near the entrance of the squatter's settlement to house our regular activities like women's and children's groups, tutoring centers and even special events such as the dentists coming and clothes giveaways. In 2008, the organization who owned the building asked us to leave. By God's grace, a woman in the precario with a meeting room built into the center of her house took us in. The space was hot and stuffy each week but it at least allowed us to continue.
Nonetheless, sweat ran down the faces of staff and team members, interns, volunteers and community members each week as they prayed for the day that we could find a better situation for our work.
That year, as Boy With a Ball staff members returned to the U.S. to staff camps for the summer, an old friend of the team, Deborah Zampieri-Fulgham, connected us with her husband, Phillip, who was in the graduate design program at Auburn University.
Within a few weeks, Phillip and a group of fellow students at Auburn University began conversations with Boy With a Ball about the possibility of coming up with a design for building a community center in the precario and by early 2010, preparations were being made for them to come and begin the building. BWAB bought a decent sized lot within El Triangulo and the work began in April.
Problems arose as BWAB staffers quickly realized that the project would dramatically exceed their initial cost projections and what happened in the next couple of months was beyond anything any of us had ever experienced. Lincoln student Glori Sojo connected us with the Western Union Foundation who agreed to make a significant donation as did the Jackson Healthcare Foundation, Keith Family Foundation, Costa Rican retailer, Pequeño Mundo and many individuals.
BWAB team members served beyond their limits, carrying bricks, developing videos to publicize the project and watching the construction site when necessary. The project finally completed in October, one day before the international press junket and grand opening which was attended by Western Union Foundation Program Director Tony Tapia and many members of El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica's board of directors.
This building has dramatically enhanced the ability of El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica to provide developmental programs for the community and it has also accelerated the community's development.
Evaluation Takes Center Stage
Joy Sheraden joined the Boy With a Ball team in 2008 in San Jose, Costa Rica and made an immediate impact with her blue collar work ethic and her profound commitment for the women and children of the precario. Joy's background as an educator and her Master's degree in education brought her to mind as Boy With a Ball Global's Executive Director Jamie Johnson was looking to strengthen the organization's capacity to measure the impact of our work. Within the not-for-profit world, evaluation exists to allow organizations to develop tools that measure the effectiveness of each of its programs as well as the organization's overall capacity to fulfill its mission. Joy took to this work like a fish to water and immediately began developing a comprehensive plan for tracking absolutely everything that was happening across the organization including performing a mammoth community census within the El Triangulo squatter's settlement.
Joy's work has gone on to show just how impactful the team's work had been over the previous years as we learned from the data she collected that the community had been developed so significantly that 40% of the community had been helped to make it out of the precario and those who remained had seen their average level of education rise from a 3rd grade to a 6th grade level.
The AASCA Leadership Conference
As Boy With a Ball continued providing camps for Lincoln School, the school found itself responsible for the 2009 AASCA Leadership Conference. AASCA is an association of the finest international schools across Central America and the conference invited a selection of the top student leaders from each of these schools to come together and participate in leadership development programs.
Boy With a Ball's years of experience in summer camps allowed us to develop an exciting four day camp for the students, many of whose parents were leaders within their countries, that was held at La Montana, the finest camp site in Central America.
The theme for the camp was, "Head, Heart and Hands," and Deloitte's Paul Nadeau, Executive Life Coach Jeff Thompson and BWAB's Chairman of the Board of Directors, Randy Cottingham, came in to provide talks.
The conference produced dramatic outcomes and praise including the following:
On behalf of Colegio Maya I want to thank you all very much for the wonderful organization of the Leadership Conference. Our students comments when asked have been: awesome, incredible, unforgettable. This has been an extremely positive experience for our students. We appreciate very much all your effort.
Sincerely,
Maria de los Angeles de Parker
General Director
Colegio Maya El Salvador
BWAB Global Offices Relocated to San Antonio
As El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica grew closer and closer to being able to stand on its own as a self-sustainable organization, Boy With a Ball Global began relocating assets back to San Antonio, Texas where the team had decided to relocate our organization's headquarters. In late spring, Development Director Melody Strom-Currie was the first to arrive in San Antonio from Costa Rica and she began helping the organization find an office. In December, Jamie and Kathy Johnson and their three children moved back to San Antonio to join Melody and to begin the work of establishing the BWAB Global offices as well as to reform Boy With a Ball San Antonio.
After six wonderful years of investing their lives in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Johnsons returned home to the United States.
El Niño y la Bola Nicaragua is Born
In late 2009, the families of nine students made contact with Boy With a Ball's Regional Director Josue Garcia looking for a way to keep their high achieving young people in school. Difficult weather has left these families without the crops they need to survive and, as a result, trying to feed each person in the house had become their central challenge. Keeping kids in school was forced to fall by the wayside.
In late February, in response to receiving another set of letters from these same students, Boy With a Ball Global staff traveled by bus, taxi and ferry to arrive at the island of Ometepe around 7 pm on a Sunday evening. As they arrived at a local pastor's house in the dark, they walked onto a porch where the students had been waiting for several hours. Our staff asked them to each tell about where they were in their studies, what their dreams were and what kind of help was necessary to help them stay in school and graduate. One by one, the students laid out their cases, each one speaking with sincerity and passion. Each one refusing to settle for quitting.
In the end, we offered the group a deal: Boy With a Ball would head back to look for the finances necessary for these students to go to school in exchange for the students returning to the island once a month to be trained as a Boy With a Ball team that could turn and help other Nicaraguan young people. The students agreed without flinching.
On Monday night, April 19th, Western Union Foundation's Program Director Tony Tapia sent an email giving us the news. They were giving us the money we would need to help the students. They could go to school.
Two years have passed and these students have grown their organization, El Niño y la Bola Nicaragua to three locations: Nicaragua's capital city, Managua, the tourism capital of Nicaragua, Granada and back home, on Ometepe where they are all from. The team now includes 16 core members, half being high school students and half being college students. They are working to reach young people and equip them as leaders including providing tutoring centers and youth development activities in high-risk areas.
Boy With a Ball San Antonio Reforms
As Boy With a Ball Global team members relocated to establish the global offices in San Antonio, they began to look for ways to support long-time BWAB Southside Directors Chris and Kelli Mora who had been working with young people and families across the south side of San Antonio for many years as a part of Boy With a Ball.
Their initial efforts included going into San Antonio to do the ethnographic work involved in understanding the challenges that young people and their families were facing across the city. Boy With a Ball Global team members began participating in the Mayor's Dropout Prevention Initiative, meeting with local area non-profits, churches and community members and doing research. Two areas emerged that seemed to be critical to the future of San Antonio: A high school dropout crisis and poverty.
Steps were taken to reestablish a Boy With a Ball San Antonio team and to begin the process of founding Boy With a Ball San Antonio as an independent non-profit including setting up an office, beginning mentoring and tutoring programs, attracting volunteers and designing programs that could make a significant impact in the city's trouble areas.
El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica Transitions into Indigenous Leadership
Much of 2010 included one Boy With a Ball Global team member after another moving from San Jose, Costa Rica to live in San Antonio, Texas in order to work out of the BWAB Global offices. El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica had been established as an independent Costa Rican Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and had its own board of directors who governed it, but the organization took a huge step towards maturity in October of 2010, when El Niño y la Bola Executive Director Anna Currie stepped down and was replaced by Jose Francisco Arias Perez. Jose, or "Chicky" as the team calls him, and Anna had been the critical young leaders that helped develop the organization. Jose's arrival as the leader of the organization marked the moment in which El Niño y la Bola CR transitioned completely into the hands of local and indigenous leaders.
BWAB Global Team Strengthens in San Antonio
With local teams continuing to develop in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and San Antonio, Texas, the need for a strong intermediary organization that could support, equip and network these local organizations became more and more clear and critical. Throughout 2010, BWAB Global team members like Communications Directors Nathaniel and Serene Latoni, Field Team Member James Williams, and Evaluation Director Joy Sheraden, all arrived in San Antonio to live and work.
Their presence together in San Antonio required facing a good deal of reverse culture shock to re-acclimate to life in the U.S.A. and also brought about the need for beginning regular travel from global team members back to Costa Rica and Nicaragua to help develop the local teams.
BWAB San Antonio Establishes Cross-age Mentoring Program Called Velocity & Rosemont Community Development Program
As Boy With a Ball looked to reestablish itself in San Antonio in 2010, talks were begun with Dr. Michael Karcher, a friend and key part of the BWAB scientific advisory council, about a way to partner together. Dr. Karcher is a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Human Development and Education Department and within the world of mentoring is considered one of the world's experts. He had designed a Cross-Age Peer Mentoring Program that fit us very well and allowed us to take it beyond just being a program. A lot of discussing, planning and theorizing came together in January of 2011 as we began mentor training with a group of high school students. After a semester of training and a summer break, the now 10th grade students were excited to meet their 6th grade mentees, and begin the much talked about relationship. These students, from Harlandale High School and Harlandale Middle School located on the Southside of San Antonio, now have been meeting weekly after school and developing potentially life-changing friendships. Their families are being drawn in and the overall excitement about the program continues to grow with each passing week.
True to the expansive nature of Boy With a Ball, just being involved in schools did not seem to be enough and finding areas where our development method and theory of change could be applied was also in the works. As one West side apartment complex we were working in was closed by the government due to a tragic accident, we began looking to see where else we could get involved. Through a series of meetings with key people, were introduced to Rosemont Apartments on the East side of the city. We began doing a lot of ethnographic work through the early part of 2011 which led to a highly successful summer literacy program, Read Write to Lead Rosemont, which in turn led to many significant relationships within the community. Much of our team's focus and a large part of our volunteers are consistently involved with weekly outreach activities including homework help and mentoring relationships. There is much expectancy and excitement to see what happens next within this community.
BWAB Global and El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica Receive $150,000 CARSI Grant From US State Department
One of the secrets to Boy With a Ball's success over the years has been that every aspect of who we are and what we do is built upon relationships. This is even true as far as how the organization is funded in that 83% of our support has come from either individual donors or local churches. This is not the case for most organizations who live and die by large grants and find themselves changing their mission just to be able to fit into the criterion for the next big "Request For Proposals". Having many funders from all over the place allows an organization to be agile and free to do what is best for the young people and families that we serve.
As a result of this, it came as a surprise when the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica invited us to apply for a grant as part of the CARSI program in 2010. USAID, the Organization of American States and the U.S. government all determined that investment and development of countries cannot take place without security existing. The drug trade and the crime and violence it spawns were growing at a rate to undermine the development of countries across Latin America and so a fund was developed that would invest in programs that could develop at-risk young people and keep them from falling into these kind of high-risk behaviors.
Over time, Boy With a Ball's work in El Triangulo using our theory of change, "TOMSE," or Teams, Outreach, Mentoring, Small Groups and Equipping/Education had dramatically transformed the precario both in helping 40% of the community make it out of the squatters settlement while also lifting the average level of education from 3rd grade to 6th grade.
In June of 2011, Boy With a Ball Global and El Niño y la Bola Costa Rica were notified they had received a $150,000 grant to hire the staff and provide the training necessary to strengthen our work in El Triangulo, expand to a second larger precario called "Los Cuadros" and develop a written model for developing slums that could be replicated across Costa Rica and later the world. Receiving this fund has put both organizations in both the blessed situation of being able to expand as well as heightened our need for and our pursuit of additional individual funders, foundations and churches to help us survive as the grant ends in a year.
El Niño y la Bola Nicaragua Executive Director Erlin Alvarez Jiminez Goes Full Time
Erlin Alvarez Jiminez is a young lawyer who graduated from the Autonomous University of Nicaragua at Managua (UNAM) and who married a UNAM architecture student Yovelsy in 2010. Erlin played a critical role in helping establish El Niño y la Bola Nicaragua as he jumped into administrating our scholarship program and leading our team in Nicaragua on a volunteer basis because his heart was to see other Nicaraguans graduating and succeeding just as he and Yovelsy had. As time went on and the couple were trained and cared for by Boy With a Ball Global's Regional Director Josue Garcia Sarmiento as well as the rest of the Global team, it became clear that Erlin's dream was to lead an NGO that could help develop the young people of his country.
In September, funds were raised to allow him go full time as the Executive Director of El Niño y la Bola Nicaragua. Erlin and his team are now working to develop a board of directors and to register with Nicaragua as an NGO while continuing to build and expand the team and their impact on the young people of Nicaragua.
BWAB Global Preps For Scaling Up
In July of 2011, BWAB Global staff members headed to Washington D.C. for meetings with USAID, HHS, the Departments of Education and Labor and many other friends and partners who care about our work. Again and again in our meetings, the groups we would meet with would tell us we had grown to the point that our next step would be to "go to scale." Going to scale in the international development world means to increase your impact or to expand your work to reach larger populations. Boy With a Ball's long-term goal has always been to reach and develop as many young people in as many countries as possible. This past decade has allowed the organization to define and establish key principles and programs and a key theory of change to developing young people and their families that very much need to be spread across the world.
In order to prepare for this moment, the Boy With a Ball Global organization has worked not only to do what we do in developing young people and their families but also to become capable of equipping local organizations in team development, program development, financial management, fund development, evaluation, communications and public relations, human resources, board development and volunteer coordination.
As we have prepared a proposal to begin presenting to major funders like USAID and other larger funders, we have received letters of support from the Costa Rican government and the U.S. State Department and have had significant conversations with consultants and experts who see our model for developing slums as ready to go to scale.
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Where will your donations go?
Investing In Our Development
Boy With a Ball's work in developing communities is powered by our capacity to build teams that reach out into these communities to connect with the young people and families living there and then to draw them into mentoring relationships and developmental small groups where they can be equipped to be leaders. The reason this work has been so effective with so little expense is our capacity to begin a volunteer movement that mobilizes a community to join us in our work. These volunteers include young people and family members from every income level and every demographic but they also include local businesses, corporations and churches. Melody Currie was brought into the organization in 2008 to be trained with our team in Costa Rica to be able to focus on this "development" work involved in building these partnerships with local businesses, corporations, churches and individuals in the community. Her efforts have led us into partnerships with the Intel Corporation, with Western Union, with Costa Rican retailer, Pequeno Mundo, with San Antonio-based grocer, HEB and with many churches across the U.S. These relationships have helped generate thousands of volunteer hours, significant amounts of donations of school supplies and other in-kind donations and financial investment as well. We have seen the impact that Melody's position has had in allowing our work to expand as well as in helping lead local communities into supporting youth development.
Investing in Evaluation
Boy With a Ball's Evaluation Director, Joy Sheraden, is a rising star not only within Boy With a Ball but within the international development world. Joy's capacity to absorb information and to apply it to developing tools that allow Boy With a Ball to measure and analyze the impact of our work has set us a part from so many other organizations out there. It was Joy's idea to do a census in the El Triangulo precario in San Jose, Costa Rica that led to our discovery that the community had decreased in size from 3,000 individuals to just 1,800 as a result of our work in helping families develop. It was also Joy whose data showed us that that same squatter's settlement had gone from the average individual having a 3rd grade education to having a 6th grade education because of our investment of almost 5,000 hours of volunteer tutoring and providing school supplies for nearly 500 children. Boy With a Ball's commitment to evaluation allows the money invested in our work to be multiplied a hundred fold as we are able to do better work, in a better way with those it will best impact.
Investing in Continuity
Functioning with a modest budget has kept Boy With a Ball clean and mean but it has often left us in the precarious situation of having a bad month financially and not knowing for certain whether programs would be able to continue as a result. Boy With a Ball's Board of Directors has responded to this situation by deciding to set aside an fund to hold in reserve in order to stand as a guarantee that the our programs and our work will not be knocked off line by a stretch of diminished giving. This work to secure our work is both vital and a tremendous help to the young people and families we serve.
Investing in Nicaragua
Boy With a Ball is now two years old in Nicaragua and the organization there has a full-time executive director and is in the process of establishing a board of directors in order to become a self-sustaining, locally-funded organization. These last two years have been riveting as sixteen students have been provided with scholarships so that they can stay in high school or in the university. In return, they have formed teams in three locations that are working to reach and develop Nicaraguan young people and their families with programs like outreaches, tutoring centers, small groups and mentoring relationships. In order to provide them with the time it will take to build the organization well, Boy With a Ball Global is investing in their work and helping provide the capacity building training and funds necessary to keep them moving forward to the place of being funded by local businesses and individuals.
