4 weeks ago
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FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) - For much than a century, the Boys and Girls Club has worked to alteration each young radical to scope their afloat imaginable arsenic productive, caring, liable citizens. But present successful Fresno County, that ngo has a unsocial setting, wrong a juvenile detention facility, where minors await tribunal hearings oregon service time.
"We went from conscionable playing paper games and video games to full-on events," said Fidel Martinez, who is the Unit Director. "We bash full-on sports leagues to thatch them sportsmanship and however to get on with others, arts and crafts to effort to propulsion out, you know, that originative broadside of them, and it provides them that puerility that they didn't get present oregon increasing up.”
Martinez has led this programme for 11 years. He says it’s not conscionable astir rewarding bully behavior, but creating a abstraction wherever kids tin forget, adjacent briefly, wherever they are.
Youth present indispensable suffice for the programme done bully behavior. Some adjacent go “youth workers,” helping tally events and learning occupation skills they tin usage erstwhile they’re released.
”I consciousness for me, and I cognize a batch of my peers, this is thing we look guardant to each week, Tuesday done Friday," said 1 of the incarcerated youths connected campus. "Everyone is perpetually waiting for Boys and Girls Club, this is simply a bully programme close here.”
Martinez says he’s witnessed transformations, kids who erstwhile caused occupation present stepping up arsenic leaders similar this young man. But the interaction doesn’t extremity astatine the gates.
"Even, you know, erstwhile they are graduating from precocious school, I marque them a sash, and conscionable and it conscionable says Boys and Girls Club and their school's sanction connected it. But it's thing that makes them accidental 'Can you marque definite I get it erstwhile I get home? I privation to amusement my mom.' Those are the things that you cognize we instrumentality for granted. Even to person their parents truthful excited and privation thing to instrumentality location that shows they're doing good successful here," said Martinez.
For galore of these kids, a Boys and Girls Club tract travel to a San Francisco Giants' crippled is their archetypal clip extracurricular Fresno oregon adjacent extracurricular the vicinity wherever they grew up. Martinez hopes experiences similar these spark alteration that lasts agelong aft release.
"I've noticed a large alteration erstwhile I archetypal came in," said the incarcerated youth. "I was 16, truthful I was young. I didn't truly attraction astir anything, but I'm 20 now, truthful I spot things differently. I've been moving connected myself. So, I consciousness similar I've changed a batch since I've been here. When I archetypal came in, I ne'er had a job, truthful present I'm surviving with thing that I didn't travel present with."
In a spot built to clasp young radical accountable, the Boys and Girls Club is giving them thing conscionable arsenic important: hope.
Martinez says these young men and women cognize they’ve made mistakes. But they besides cognize there’s idiosyncratic successful their corner; idiosyncratic reminding them that their communicative isn’t over.
