Ford Resource Engagement Center

Here we are at the halfway mark of my first 100 days as president and CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan and the team has been hard at work reimagining the future of our Club.

The first few days were all about getting to know our Clubs, our kids and our supporters and really taking in their feedback in order to set the vision.

From there we capped the year off with holiday events, unprecedented partnerships, and strategic focus as the staff leaned into creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within their Clubs.

It’s been an amazing ride, and your feedback has been plentiful. In fact, we heard from one of our Club alumni from southwest Detroit, who reached out via Facebook to ask about our plan for moving this organization forward.

To answer Donald and all the other sponsors, members, and generous supporters who have reached out with similar inquiries, I’d like to share with you the first part of our Strategic Framework for Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan. The first two phases of this framework are centered around two questions:

What does a world-class experience look like? So, first and foremost, we have to reimagine the club experience for our members. We began the year by kicking off our #ReimagineBGCSM campaign to really ask ourselves, “What does a world-class experience look like? “

How do you infuse startup culture into a 93 year old organization? Secondly, we have to change the culture of our organization. I consider us to be a 93-year-old startup. So, how do we change the culture to be all about innovation and entrepreneurship?

In order to accomplish explore these goals, we’ve been taking our staff and some key partners around to benchmark off of a few key facilities in Detroit.

Ponyride

TechTown

The Ford Resource & Engagement Center

These are all fantastic organizations that can help us explore how space can really help us change the footprint of our organization. If we get this right, the potential of our impact is huge!

To put it in context, we have 125,000 square feet of programming space across Southeastern Michigan, sitting on 12 acres of land, and the opportunity to serve 250,000 youth within a five-mile radius of our Clubs. That’s a gigantic opportunity to really engage the community in a big way.

If you have suggestions or want to be a part of the visioning sessions as we reimagine our Club spaces, leave us a comment on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter using hashtag: #ReimagineBGCSM. We want to hear from you!

Stay tuned for a lot more to come!

Startup. This trending buzzword is used to describe everything from the hottest multi-million dollar grossing social media platforms to your local campus comic store. It can be tough to grasp the meaning of a term that has been so widely flexed to describe all things cool, techie, and new.

So, what actually is a startup company?

There you have it.

As we begin to reimagine Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan, we have been challenged by our new President to think of our prestigious and storied 93-year-old organization as a startup, complete with potential co-working spaces for local entrepreneurs and innovative programming for kids.

Now, this may seem like a challenging feat but when you consider the fact that we are competing in a new technological world for the attention of our increasingly tech-savvy, entrepreneurial spirited youth, it makes perfect sense that we should infuse startup culture into our Clubs.

“Startup culture is about more than bean bags, gluten-free snacks, and ping pong tables,” said UCS Executive Director, Ebony Flake. “There are some very essential elements in building a startup.”

So what are those elements, and how might startup culture look and feel for our organization? To answer these questions, the BGCSM staff took a field trip to Ponyride, a co-working space where artists, entrepreneurs, makers, and nonprofits come together to create and collaborate.

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Reimagining the #BGCSEM means touring various collaborative spaces with community partners, driving inspiration from spaces like @ponyridedetroit! And wow, were we impressed! Not only by the coworking spaces available to start ups, but the collaboration we witnessed between companies like @beremarkable and @rebelnell These two women led a remarkable conversation about the power of innovation, stepping outside of what’s comfortable to achieve what’s meant to be. These two social entrepreneurs are an outstanding example of reimaging the status quo, for a greater tomorrow! Thank you, @angeliquevelez and @petersoneh for spending time with us and sharing your stories! We are inspired and excited for the future! We look forward to growing and creating positive change together. #philanthropy #socialmedia #nptech #jobs #job #mediation #fundraising #charity #marketing #innovation #4charity #reimagining #reimagine #CSR #goodchange #funding #donors #volunteering #givingback #kids #change #notforprofit

A post shared by Boys & Girls Clubs of SE MI (@bgcsem) on Jan 15, 2019 at 4:58pm PST

We began with a guided tour of individual vendor spaces where startup founders spoke about their business models and shared their organizational mission.

From there, we heard from an expert panel of social entrepreneurs as they discussed what it means to launch and run a successful startup.

Moderated by Shawn H. Wilson, the panel included Amy Peterson, CEO and Co-founder of Rebel Nell– a Detroit-based social enterprise that creates Graffiti Jewelry from chipped paint, and Angelique Velez, Founder of  BeRemarkable, -a startup which partners with social influencers to promote positive use of social media.

I took three major learnings from our benchmarking trip to PonyRide:

1. No Space Goes Wasted: Every square inch of the space can be used for something.
2. Collaboration is Key: There’s an organic collaboration that happens when you put a diverse group of creatives together in a space.
3. Color Matters: Hand painted murals, vibrant colors, and interesting decor – they all help to trigger creative energy and inspire innovation.

Ultimately all three of these components are needed to create a world class experience for our members.

Stick around to follow the journey as we #ReimagineBGCSM