Aloha BGCBI Family!

With COVID-19 still at large, we are at a time where family, care, and community support is much needed. We at the Boys & Girls Club of the Big Island are committed to serving our youths and their families during these tough times. As we continue our Community Support Meal Initiative we have not forgotten about our youths and have been diligently finding ways to connect with them while they stay safe at home. Our amazing Site Coordinators, Youth Development Specialists, Volunteers, and other staff members looked to online telecommunication and teleconferencing to connect with our BGCBI families. On our new online teachings website, we are providing our youths with fun learning activities that keep their minds sharp as we all wait to return to our regular activities.

Having telecommunication helps us give our youths a sense of normalcy by letting them see their mentors and tutors, albeit virtually not physically, and engage in activities they would have done in our clubhouse. Several of our club sites have been actively contributing with activities and we hope to have even more virtual meetings and videos to share with our youths and their families. Every youth is a sponge that absorbs the knowledge around them and being at home doesn't mean our youths can't be learning. To help nurture and provide good habits for our youths to absorb, we are also creating take home packets full of resources. These packets include gardening materials, science experiments, cultural learning, positive action, and more. We hope to use these packets as supplementary teachings to our youths who cannot access us online. We are currently creating a system in place to distribute these packets safely to our youths, so more updates will follow suit.

We hope to continuously support our youths during this time of uncertainty and we also ask the community to help our goal. Please consider visiting our BGCBI gofundme page if you'd like to contribute towards the meal initiative or paypal for this new teleconferencing goal. Donating is not the only way to help though, sharing posts about our programs can also help us in the long run. Your help will allow us to reach more youths who need us as the community faces many uncertainties and fears. Our hope is to spread more aloha with the programs we have set in place for our youths.

Stay safe everyone.

BGCBI Team.