Can You Help Us Get School Supplies to Children in Costa Rica?

An Urgent Need & An Amazing Opportunity For You To Help Children Get the School Supplies They Need

It is February and February is the time in which families in Costa Rica head out to buy the $100 of school supplies each of their children need in order to continue going to school. Stores fill the newspapers with ads about special deals on what the students need. It is an exciting time for a country that has fought very hard to help their people be educated.

February is a little different if you are a young person living in a precario or squatter's settlement like the El Triangulo de la Solidaridad neighborhood we work in. With the average income per household being around $200 in the precario, most families can barely afford one child's $100 of school supplies and that is only if things are going well for their family.

It is easy to see why the average precario resident has only made it through the 3rd grade. It only takes one tough February economically where $100 might as well be $1 million and the boy or girl is forced to drop out of school, surrendering any chance of a life outside of poverty one day.

Fifty Young Peoples Lives Are Changed in the Precario

In 2007, our team began helping about nine families purchase the school supplies they needed. It was life-changing for them but, surprisingly, it was life-altering for us as well. Family members wept as we walked into hand them the supplies they needed.

In 2008, we went ahead and set aside $1000 to help 10 families get school supplies. We sent out an email to all of you and you responded by either donating $ or supplies. Your response was overwhelming. As a result, over fifty students received school supplies. The precario was dramatically impacted.

Over the course of the year, we took the program further. We opened tutoring centers in the precario (see photo above) where the students could also receive the tutoring support they would need to be able to do well in school. It isn't enough to help kids get into school. We have to help them do well once they get there. These tutoring centers have been a powerful tool, providing upper class private school students with the life changing opportunity to come and volunteer the tutoring that is dramatically helping the children from the precario.

This is a gift that keeps on giving.

How You Can Help A Child Have A Chance At A Future

So here we are in February again. Families are filling out request forms that we have designed where they are agreeing to report their child's grades each report card so we can track their progress and provide support for those who might struggle. We have just started collecting the lists and have already received 34 back with 59 in total having been requested.

I want to invite you into an amazing opportunity to help these young people and their families. If you can and if you are interested, please click on the link below to go to our website at www.boywithaball.com and make an online donation. You can also send in a check to our office at P.O. Box 14387, San Antonio, TX, 78214-4387. Your gift will help us to be combined with those who have brought down school supplies to fill these lists and help these students have the opportunity to stay in school.

Click Here to Go to Boy With a Ball's Online Donation Page to Make a Donation to Help These Students

One Final Exciting Update

A dream is coming true for the Boy With a Ball/FUNDADEJO team in Costa Rica as Auburn University's graduate design program has taken on the project of designing and coming to Costa Rica to build us a community/tutoring center for us in the precario. The group is currently raising funds for the project with our staff to design the building. To find out more, click on the tutoring center box below.


(Click here to enter the site and learn more about the center!)


Thank you so much for your ongoing investment in our work to reach and equip young people. It is great to work with you as we walk into seeing these young lives changed.

Jamie Johnson

Executive Director
boywithaball@gmail.com
www.boywithaball.com
210-858-5812

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.

A Tour of the Precario

Here is a virtual tour of the Precario with the Boy With a Ball team last Saturday.

We will do this more and more regularly and with better and better video quality. Get in there and meet these amazing people with members of the BWAB team.

A Day in the Precario

Snow, Meetings in Miami & Outreach in Costa Rica

As the Executive Director of Boy With a Ball (this is Jamie writing), one of my responsibilities is to travel away from my work in helping to build the San Jose, Costa Rica team both to go and support of our San Antonio, Texas team, to help build BWAB's involvement in camps and conferences in the U.S. and then to continue to represent BWAB and our work to the academic, corporate and government world.

I left San Jose last Wednesday and headed to Miami, Florida to be with Joseph Holbrook, a longtime veteran of the kind of work we do as well as the founder of a work on the southside of Miami that I believe is extremely important. Joseph is doing graduate work at Florida International University with a focus on Latin America and is an important advisor and supporter of what we are doing.

Joseph and I had great conversations including meeting with a psychologist, Dr. Sam Lopez and meeting with several of the young leaders in his group there.

On Thursday I drove over with former BWAB Costa Rica Street Team member Ruth Holbrook and had meetings with Dr. Pantin and Dr. Muir of the University of Miami Center of Family Studies. I will make a seperate post on how those meetings went but I believe they will be vital in helping us continue to learn how to reach into Latin American families in a way that strengthens the family unit rather than weakening the role of the father and mother as we connect with their children. Some of what we heard on Thursday could very well mean that most of what is being done to help Latino youth in the U.S. and Latin America could be doing far more damage than good. I will keep you posted in the next few days.

Yesterday I flew from Miami in the early morning to LaGuardia Airport in NYC. I was supposed to catch an immediate flight to Columbus, Ohio for some planning meetings for the ACM Conference but I never got there. Snow and ice came before I could get back on the plane and before I knew it, I was trapped! As I talked to airline representatives, I found that I would at least be trapped in New York City until Sunday and probably Monday. I was in the airport all day yesterday before taking a cab to Manhattan to stay with Ben and Heather Grizzle in Central Park West who have been very kind to take me in.

While I was trapped in the airport and then trudging through the snow and talking to my taxi driver about what it is like to be a Puerto Rican young person growing up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Costa Rican Street Team member Anna Currie was heading into the Precario for our women's group in the morning and then coleading a team with Costa Rican team members that headed out into downtown San Jose to give out coffee and cookies to homeless kids, teen prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes and the like as a way of connecting with them and building relationships with them. This morning as I write this looking out the window at snow covered Central Park, Anna is heading out with team members there again to head into the Precario to do door to door relational outreach work.

This is the daily life of Boy With a Ball as we fight to help young people. Snow and ice, coffee and cookies. Puerto Rican taxi drivers in Brooklyn, transvestite prostitutes in Parque Morazan in San Jose. Psychology professors in Miami one day, single mothers in the Precario the next.

I hope to see many of you as I finally get out of NYC in the next few days and continue this trip.