 Welcome to INSIGHT, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving north-central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Andrea Onstead, Executive Director of Boys and Girls Club of Beminci Area. Andrea has generously agreed to share some of her experience with us. I'd like to thank you Andrea for joining us today. Thank you for the invitation. So the Boys and Girls Club National Organization chapters all over the country, but serving boys and girls and families within a broad geographic region where people are dispersed comes with specific challenges. Talk about the services that you provide in Beminci in north-central Minnesota. The Boys and Girls Club of the Beminci Area serves 600 youth annually, ages 6 through 18 years old, and we serve them with after-school programming and summer programming. We focus on three key areas. One is academic support, academic enrichment and success, as well as health, healthy lifestyles, and leadership. And so everything that we do at the club, we've got a technology room and an art room. We have a garden and greenhouse. All of those things wrap up into those three main components about academic health and leadership. And the way that we serve our kids is providing this year-round programming experience. We serve the kids mainly out of our clubhouse at 1600 Minnesota Avenue here in Beminci. And of the 600 or so members, about 75% of them are 12 and younger, 25% in that tween. We call it tween, that middle school age and high school age. And some do come from outside of our area because they're visiting their grandparents or perhaps they're in transition. But a majority of those 600 kids and teens are from the Beminci area specifically. And you have quite a diverse group of children that you serve. So talk about the breakdown of those children and the specific challenges that you face in remaining culturally competent to provide appropriate services. So we serve about 50% Caucasian youth. Of European extraction. And then about 30% of Native American, American Indian youth. About 10% are multicultural so have more than two or more races that they affiliate with. 5% are African American and then just 1% in the Asian and Hispanic. On a typical day in the school year we're serving anywhere between 160 to upwards of 215 youth with structured programming. So they come from school and we give them a little bit of time to kind of like get their wiggles out. And then we feed them. That's an important component. Over 50% of the youth that we serve come from families and poverty. And so that healthy, nutritious snack is very important to them in being active at the club and being participating and also just for their health and wellness. Understanding the experience of the youth that you serve or the children that you serve and being able to provide the services that they need so that they can then have a good experience is very important. In a sense you also function as an extension of various services but now provided through a non-profit on a volunteer basis. So the first being nutrition. We know that kids can do better in school academically when they are not worried and they have food insecurities. And so feeding them a healthy snack and also some of that healthy snack comes directly from our garden and greenhouse. So our kids are getting the opportunity to actually from seed plant lettuce and tomatoes and potatoes and kale and all kinds of vegetables. So they're getting to actually see the fruits and vegetables of their labor and eating that. And we actually there's been many, many kids that have come to the club that have said they are now eating tomatoes. They never did before either because their family can't afford fresh produce because it is a little more expensive. Or they just don't they somehow don't have that access or it's not ingrained in their family structure of eating healthy. And indeed you were from PageMood News on the Mamiji Pioneer. Yes just yesterday. With your vegetable garden. Yes. And there must be a lot of pride associated with eating the food that you have grown. Yes and the kids are they are doing this. And so we do have a couple of staff that are helping that bring this knowledge and expertise from the University of Minnesota Extension. And we have some funders that are wholly sold on the fact that I mean our kids are fighting an epidemic around obesity, childhood obesity, as well as the fact that we are becoming more sedentary all of this technology. And so we want to provide this opportunity to get outside, get in the outdoors, realize that our food isn't just coming from major fast food restaurant chains, that they can grow food and enjoy whole produce. And actually one of our assistant directors just shared with me a story of one of our club members that was struggling behaviorally and had a lot of issues with a lot of issues in school. And some of those school issues were rippling to the club. And so she brought him to our garden area saying hey we just need to take a little bit of break from the stimuli that's happening in the club. Because the club is a very vibrant and active and fun place to be. But sometimes it can be a little over sensory for some of our kids that have those struggles. And so she brought him out to the greenhouse with just a couple other kids. And I tell you what, his behavior, his attitude, he just was able to calm. He had one thing to focus on. And over the course of just a few minutes, his behavior changed wholly. His experience at the club has been different since then so that we know how to serve them. We have about 61 on one mentoring relationships that are going on. We're serving 600 but we've identified 10% of our kids that are really in the most crisis need the most help. Maybe don't have the family or the financial or the support network that we all would wish for. And so we've identified about 10% of those kids and my staff along with some really great community members are mentoring these kids on a once a week basis and talking to them about setting goals for themselves and in terms of academics and health and behavior and things like that. But it's one of those cool things that we now know what that key point is for that young man. Bringing him into the garden was really kind of a revolutionary thing. He had never had that experience before and how that could make his experience at the club so much better. And that's clearly an instance, clearly an instance in which you cannot just exhort a young person toward self-reliance. You cannot say to the family, why do you have this problem? Why aren't you solving it? At that point it's really important that other members of the community lend a hand and intervene and provide the support. How are you funded so that you can provide your programs? Let's talk about that because that's on the forefront of my mind almost every day. We this year just started our new fiscal year budget, July 1st. And our operating budget will be $725,000 this year. Over 50% of that comes from contributions from businesses and individuals. The next 20% comes from our special events. So we have this amazing Valentine's Gala, a golf tournament, a couple of other bowling tournaments and so forth. And these are combined events in which you're marketing the organization and its value. So you're communicating. Telling the story. Telling the story. You're bringing people together. You're delivering fun, a great experience, but you're also fundraising at the same time. Right. And so added onto, so that was 20%. So added onto the 50%. 70% of our funds really come from our, for the most part, our local contributors, our local people. People who could come into the club and see by taking a tour with me or one of our board members or one of our staff, the return on their investment to see these children's faces and to know that we are helping them. And statistically, I'll just have you know, Mark, that our kids in Bemidji are eating 11%, our kids that come to the club. Right. In Bemidji are eating 11% more vegetables than the state and national average. And we attribute that to our garden and greenhouse. But back to the funding portion, we're thankful to be a United Way agency. So that covers about 4% of our budget. And we do have a little bit of government funding, but it comes in four main categories. One is we provide these snacks and lunches and that is a funding stream through the Department of Agriculture. So there's a little, there's a reimbursement piece on when we serve a snack or a lunch. Apply for that. This mentoring program is a federal program passed to Boys and Girls Club of America. And then we apply competitively for those funds for mentoring. And it's from the Office of Justice program. We have one small state grant that is only for career programming for teens. So we providing career opportunities, working with our teens on building resume interest inventory, skills inventory, and then working them to a place where they can secure a job or secure enough volunteer experience to have a resume to secure a job. And the last one is our county, Beltrami County, will fund a portion of our gardening program because it falls within their agricultural sector of funding. What does it cost to sponsor a child so that the child can have this experience? It ranges a little bit depending on the year and the heating bill and the light bill and the cost of toilet paper and the cost of watermelons and all of the things that go into that. But typically in a year it costs between $850 to $1,000 to sponsor a child. So by contributing $850 to $1,000 you are actually giving a child a year's worth of experience with the organization, with the programs, with growing their own food. You're giving them nutrition, you're giving them enrichment programs, you're giving them tutorial services. You have 10% of your children who are getting individualized counseling and added support. You're really changing the lives of children who cannot themselves change their lives and whose family need a helping hand. That is our mission, is to inspire and enable all young people, especially those that need us most. Andrea Anstead, thank you so much for sharing your experience at Boys and Girls Club of Midgy Area. Thank you. And thank you so much for your insights.