Boys & Girls Clubs wins top nonprofit award for reaching kids, keeping staff

SOUTH BEND — One local charity is having an adolescent kind of growth spurt. And it’s lifting literacy and math proficiency among most of the 3,000 kids who come to its after-school and other programs.

But there are plans now to expand that to 5,000 kids. CEO Jacqueline Kronk isn’t done. She’s thinking of the all-time high of 989 kids on the waiting list at the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County. Many of those kids are in school.

“The kids we really need to find — they're not even at school,” she said. “We need to find them.”

This attention to effectively reaching more kids helped the Boys & Girls Clubs to win this year’s Leighton Award for Nonprofit Excellence, an honor that the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County gives every two years with a major fundraising boost.

Growth in 2021: Boys & Girls Clubs to double after-school programs and boost academic help in St. Joe County

The award carries a $150,000 endowment challenge grant, meaning the charity must raise $150,000 in matching funds. The resulting $300,000 will be added to the Clubs’ endowed fund at the foundation, which generates revenue each year from the interest. The charity will also receive a $25,000 cash award.

The Leighton award, Kronk said, is well timed as the organization enters its 50th anniversary.

“It encourages us to stay hungry and stay humble,” she said after learning the news Thursday.

In the past three years, the Clubs grew from serving kids at five sites to 29 sites. One is at its main campus, and the rest are at schools around the county, including South Bend, Mishawaka and John Glenn school districts and the Career Academy and Success Academy.

“Coming out of COVID, we discovered that 90% of our kids were below proficiency academically,” Kronk said. “We realized we had a lot of work to do.”

Its after-school program, called STRIVE, aims to overcome that learning loss through a tailored curriculum and tutoring with the help of the Robinson Community Learning Center, Riverbend Math and each of the schools where clubs appear.

As The Tribune reported in 2021, STRIVE started with funding from a $7.7 million state learning recovery grant.

The Community Foundation cites that, at the end of STRIVE’s second year, 65% of students in the program advanced one or more grade levels in literacy and 69% advanced one or more grade levels in math.

But Kronk said she’s also proud of "flipping the nonprofit model on its head.”

“We need to invest in people and compensate them well,” she said, referring to the “living wage” that the staff are paid in order to keep talented workers.

She rejects the idea of staffing good people only to then make them overworked and burned out because they don't receive the support they need in terms of living wages, professional guidance and enough staff to spread the workload.

“We want to coach our people so they can be the best version of themselves, and then they can pass that along to the kids,” Kronk said.

The Clubs' staff just passed 400 employees with a 92% retention rate, she touted.

And the charity, she said, has managed to keep up with the fundraising to support that.

“The better you get, the more they want to invest,” she said of donors. “People want to bet on a winning horse.”

Community Foundation President Rose Meissner credits Kronk and her team as being “fearless.”

“They’ve created a vision and trust that the community can get behind,” Meissner said. “I think they are going to prove that they can make a difference in the lives of these children.”

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The Community Foundation also named two “Special Recognition” winners, each receiving a $10,000 grant:

∎ Studebaker National Museum is recognized for its “impressive leadership and innovative storytelling,” the foundation said, which also credits the museum with “surging attendance … during a time when museum attendance is down across the nation and many auto museums are closing their doors for good.”

∎ Potawatomi Zoo is credited with its "continued work toward becoming a modern zoo” while enhancing the local quality of life. Since going private in 2015, the foundation cited, the zoo has invested more than $21 million in enhancements and improvements. In 2022, a record-breaking 316,000 people visited the zoo.

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Boys & Girls Clubs wins Leighton Award from Community Foundation