What A Great Year!

I hope this finds you enjoying a refreshing and restful holiday season filled with celebration of a great 2008 and expectation for 2009. I can not think of a bigger year in the history of Boy With a Ball and we are very thankful for your friendship and support of our work to reach and equip young people.

Here are a few glimpses at what all has gone on this year:

-We have expanded our work in Costa Rica this year to the point of seeing a Costa Rican team emerge that is led and composed of Costa Ricans.
-We have relaunched Chris & Kelli Mora into their work in helping young people on the Southside of San Antonio after bringing them to Costa Rica for a time of intensive training.
-We have formed a global team that will work to help launch new Boy With a Ball teams in new countries while continuing to provide support for preexisting teams.
-We have been given the privilege of running six new Camp of Champions for Lincoln International School in San Jose, Costa Rica which allows us to help form and equip the future leaders of that country.
-We launched our great new website at www.boywithaball.com.
-We expanded our work in the precario or squatter's settlement in San Jose, Costa Rica including launching a Leader's Group that we hope will produce indigenous leaders who will be able to turn and lead this work within their neighborhood.
-We began corporate partnerships with the Intel Corporation and Pequeno Mundo (a large Costa Rican retailer) that are providing exciting possibilities for this next year.
-We are working with Auburn University's graduate design program to build a new building in the precario that will be used for housing much of our work there.
-We helped over 50 children in the precario get all of the school supplies they needed to get into school and then launched a tutoring center in the precario with the help of Lincoln School students that is helping around 30 children to stay in school.
-We had four international interns come to work with our Costa Rican team. Thanks Jillian, Kevin, Alice & Christine!
-We expanded our staff including adding Melody Strom as our Development Director in the office and Josue Garcia as a Program Director in Costa Rica. (For the record, Melody has a web camera...sorry inside joke.)
-We traveled to Washington D.C. as a staff for important meetings with USAID and others there.

Walking Together into Making Change

Our vision continues to be building teams in cities across the world that can reach and equip young people and their families to turn and help others. These past two years have been an amazing opportunity to turn what once was a far-fetched vision into a growing reality.

While having a great vision, strong board of directors, talented staff and dedicated volunteers all play a huge part in this work, we have come to realize that our greatest asset in this fight are those of you who are reading this right now. Without friends and supporters of our work, Boy With a Ball would transition from a thriving reality into being a failed vision. We are thankful for your committment to us and excited by what we have been able to accomplish together.

And Now For Some Important & Moving News

After six years of amazing work, Cindy Chen is stepping down as our Boy With a Ball's Global Office Administrator and stepping up to be a mom. I want to personally recognize Cindy for her sacrificial service and for the grace and excellence with which she has functioned as a part of the Boy With a Ball team these last years. Thank you, Cindy and Sam!

With this change, we are transitioning Boy With a Ball's U.S. office presence to San Antonio, Texas and ask for each of you to note this. Kelli Mora will be stepping into Cindy's position and this is our new mailing address:

Boy With a Ball
P.O. Box 14387
San Antonio, TX 78214-4387

Additionally, our new office number is 210-858-5812.


Again, thank you for your help this year and we look forward for an exciting year together in 2009.

Jamie

How The Ball Rolls...

I have said quite a few times over the past six months that I believe that August 2008 to about February 2009 are a crucial time period for Boy With a Ball. I don't even know that I can quantify why in any kind of coherent way. It just seems like so much of what we have dreamed of prior to this is culminating in this moment for the organization and that so much of what is happening is laying a foundation for our dreams for tomorrow.

Boy With a Ball exists to develop young people. Young people across the world are pliable and waiting to be developed. Sadly, the predators and parasites of the world are the ones who are doing 90% of the developing of young people. Big charities like Big Brothers/Big Sisters send a suit-wearing businessman into a barrio or neighborhood for an hour once a week and then congratulate themselves while the drug dealers, gang leaders, pimps, pedophiles, bad parents and deviants hang out in every neighborhood of every city all day, all week, all year long.

Boy With a Ball exists to develop developers of young people. We develop teams that develop teams and the result is a mass grassroots movement of youth and family development sweeping across a city and transforming it.

This year has included the launch of a new website, the massive advance and development of our team in San Jose, Costa Rica, the training and relaunch of our team in San Antonio, Texas, the establishment of our international or global team and much more.

We began a corporate partnership with the Intel Corporation earlier this year and they are designing a web-based database for us that will be a massive help in allowing us to conduct our evaluation and measurement of how the young people and families we work with are being impacted.

Please take a minute to drop by the website at www.boywithaball.com and tell us what you think.