Well, ladies if you weren’t able to attend the first meeting then you missed a very special night. Our current president, Amy Kulas, announced at the board retreat this year we were going to put the “service” back in the Lakewood Service League. This vision has been overwhelmingly embraced by the membership and last night we saw one way in which that vision will be realized.
Justin Hensley, East Dallas branch manager of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas attended our meeting and brought with him a very special young lady named, Anna. Anna was not your ordinary 17 year old. She was articulate and bright and very courageous as she stood up in front of the room full of adults to explain how the club has changed her life. Anna and her brother did not have a father in the home growing up. But they do have a very loving and strong mother who got them involved in the Boys and Girls Club. Anna told us how her mother started taking her brother to the club when she was only five. The membership age is from six to eighteen they had to sneak her in, she joked. Apparently, the family became a fixture around the place because her brother grew up in the club and now attends Texas State University and her mother is now on the staff at the club. Anna was just elected president of her key club. It was hard not to get choked up when Anna, standing at the front of the room like a soldier at attention, declared, “I am proud to say that I am college bound!” The Boys and Girls Club changed this young lady’s reality. What was not possible for her from where she sat in her apartment complex and what was not shown to her in school became a possibility when she walked through the doors of that club on Worth Street. There she was treated as though college was an inevitable conclusion, not an unrealistic dream.
The Boys and Girls Club is not just a building that people walk into and are magically transformed. It is the people that gather in under that roof that changed Anna’s entire future. It is the women like you and me that volunteer with these children. Every time an adult shows up with the desire to teach and mentor a child, that child realizes their significance. Your mere presence enhances their sense of worth. So now for Blog Lady’s call to action! Can you cook? Are you an artist or musician? Is drama your thing (now I know we have some drama queens out there but here I believe they need “theater people”)? Do you play golf or do you miss your cheerleading days in high school? Are you known for your wise counsel… or perhaps you’ve just made enough mistakes that you are qualified to counsel others on “what not to do”? The Boys and Girls Club needs adults to teach and mentor East Dallas’ kids in those and many other areas. Ladies, it truly does take a village. If you are interested in volunteering you can visit the Boys and Girls Club off Greater Dallas through their website which you can access from the Community Service page of the LSL site… more on the Lakewood Service League’s new website in my next blog.
Yours truly,
Blog Lady
