Recently, I received a call from a long-time donor. They wanted me to meet someone. Of course, I said "just send him over."
My visitor ran a tutoring service and wanted to engage our kids. He said that our donor told him our sports are top of the line but our educational opportunities are lacking. I was asked by my visitor "what do you do on the education-side?"
Now I wasn't offended, because I was acutely aware of our less-visible-but-definitely-as-impactful-as-sports numbers. We do a good job with the old smarticles. What troubled me is that this long time donor didn't know our successes.
How could a guy that has bee a part of the Club as long as I have not know this? I have a big mouth, right? I regularly tell our story. How was this missed? Our goal is to get the word out that we are more than just a gym. We love our sports, but we offer opportunities in character and leadership, the arts, technology, and career development for kids. We do sports very well, but that is not all that we are about. Its just the most visible part.
On a side note, since 2005 we have had one regular Club kid that has not graduated high school... one. This same kid has come back as a 22 year old and asked us to help him get through the GED. We have a partnership with ETBU (thanks to the departed Dr. Emberton and Blair Prevost) that helps us find Education Majors who can offer tutoring those teens that need help, we do Power Hour (homework help) every day, we take college trips at no expense to them...we do education not with shiny new uniforms and cool names like "The Falcons", but it is certainly in our repertoire.
To finish the story, I did tell our visitor that we would love to partner up with him in the fall since we love opportunity for our kids and he agreed that this would be good to discuss further. But he closed with "it sounds like you don't need to, though."
I am glad he noticed.
