Columbia Park Boys and Girls Club
Jim Richards, Executive Director
450 Guerrero St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94110
(415) 861-8232
(415) 861-7723
E-Mail: jrichards@kidsclub.org

Boys and Girls Clubs go all the way back to the 1860s, when a group of caring women in Hartford, Conn., concerned about the fate of youngsters then called “street urchins,” too young to work in the sweatshops and not served by public schools, established a place to read to these troubled children, feed them and care for them.

Now Boys and Girls Clubs have grown to a national institution, based in Atlanta, with almost 900 corporations sponsoring nearly 2,000 clubhouses around the nation. They’re somewhat akin to Boy and Girl Scout and YMCA/YWCA organizations, with the key difference that -- while they’re certainly open to all young people -- clubs are invariably located in low-income, usually urban neighborhoods, and focus their efforts on “disadvantaged” youngsters.

In their traditional form, Boys and Girls Clubs form an important piece in the network of grassroots efforts against hunger and poverty by providing safe places and mentoring for young folks.

But even by this happy standard, San Francisco’s Columbia Park club is a standout. Through its long tradition (the club has been open since 1896) and especially through Jim Richards’ creative leadership and guidance, this institution goes far beyond mere service provision, basing everything it does on the old advice about “teaching people to fish.”

“We’re not a charity but a youth-development organization,” he says, adding that it’s critical for youth-oriented initiatives to stay up with the times.

“Things that worked in the ‘70s worked in the world of the ‘70s, but they won’t work in the ‘90s if you don’t look at the marketplace.” So everything that works at Columbia Park works in terms of giving young people the tools to make it in the real world. Ebonics? When the controversy over “street talk” arose in the Bay Area, Richards’s position was clear: Young people at this club use “cash English” -- the language of Wall Street and of Main Street -- because that’s the lingua franca that leads to success. Gang colors? Columbia Park sits on the border between the territories of two notorious gangs whose colors are red and blue. These kids work together at the clubhouse, though, and they do so because, as Richards firmly says, “When you come into MY club, you wear MY colors.”

So Columbia Park offers a lot of the facilities that Boys and Girls Clubs everywhere offer, and it does them very well: Its cavernous gymnasium is clean and well-kept and safe, and it’s open very long hours, from after-school (all day during vacation and on weekends) until well into the evening -- midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.

They play “midnight basketball” here, and when it became clear that Latino youth aren’t into basketball, they added midnight soccer, too. City police officers came to provide “security” during the early months of the night sports programs, but it soon became clear that at this well-run institution, there was no need for their services.

The club’s three-story, school-like building is colorful and clean, and it includes everything from game rooms to classrooms. Its Technology Center computer facility is crammed with humming, buzzing computers (and they’re working on upgrading more); the club even created a World Wide Web site for Mayor Willie Brown.

There’s a Fine Arts Center, and a Crafts Shop with high-tech shop equipment; the Teen Center, a special area just for teens, where older youngsters can chat and study away from the noisy little folks. Its Learning Center gives youngsters a one-on-one boost if they’re having trouble in school (or even if they’re not); its “alternative high school” program focuses attention on providing strong support to 40 to 50 youngsters considered at high risk of dropping out; and special “Girls Services” programs offer an extra hand to young women with the particular problems they face in an urban community.

It’s a heck of a deal for the 1,500 youngsters of all races, creeds and colors from ages 7 to 18 who pay $5 a year for their club membership card; but there’s still much more.

Above and beyond all this, Richards is taking the club seriously into youth entrepreneurship. Several years ago, it became host to a San Francisco replication of New York’s National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which has opened an Entrepreneurship Center in the clubhouse and offers three classes every year.

Now they’ve embarked on an even more exciting course: Sunrise Sidewalk Cleaners, an actual business, employs 15 youngsters (one-third of them girls), most of them members of gangs, who now wear not “colors” but trim uniforms, and earn $6 an hour for rising at 4 a.m. and spend their pre-dawn mornings removing litter, grime and graffiti from client commercial properties throughout the Mission District.

They’ve designed their own uniforms and advertising materials, and they’ve won tremendous publicity; they’ve also learned a lot about making it in the real world, which is what this is all about. Although the lack of a business track record denied them a major contract for cleaning BART stations, at least this year, BART officials have agreed to hire Sunrise Sidewalk Cleaners for all its ad hoc “spot jobs” during the coming year, an offer that could well lead to a formal contract in the next cycle.

With a staff of just 16 full-time employees and 50 part-time (including the Sunrise cleaners and youngsters who help out with services in the clubhouse), Columbia Park gets by on a $1.4 million annual operating budget, which also covers a smaller satellite clubhouse in the city’s skid-row “Tenderloin” district. It all works, and remarkably smoothly, because Richards invokes just three simple rules for the youngsters, under four basic principles for the staff.

The rules are: