By Dr. William D. Gibson, President & CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Greater Triad
How one belief—passed from person to person—is fueling the largest active expansion currently underway anywhere in the Boys & Girls Clubs of America network.
I get asked a version of the same question a lot lately: how are you actually going to pull this off?
Six Clubs growing to as many as 30. Five counties. Ten cities. More than 9,000 kids a year by 2030. New Clubs opening this summer and fall in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, joining our long-standing work in High Point and Asheboro. It’s called Future Ready Triad, and by any measure, it’s the most ambitious thing this organization has ever attempted.
My honest answer to how we pull it off isn’t just about a budget line or the strategic plan, though we have both. It’s a belief, and the fact that belief, once it’s given to someone, doesn’t stay put. It moves.
Where This Starts for Me
I’m a Club Kid. Long before I was leading this organization, I was a kid who wasn’t the biggest or the most naturally gifted on the field, being told by my dad that hustle could close almost any gap. I believed him. And then I watched that same belief get poured into me again, by staff, tutors, and coaches at a Boys Club who told me I could accomplish anything I dreamed of, long before I had the evidence to prove it.
That belief became my center of gravity. I’ve spent a lifetime testing whether it was true; in the Marine Corps, as an entrepreneur, in nonprofit work plenty of people told me was too ambitious. Every time, it held. That personal history isn’t a nice backstory to an expansion plan. It’s the whole engine behind it.
Belief That Moves, Not Belief That Sits Still
Here’s the idea at the center of everything we’re doing: belief in a kid’s potential isn’t worth much if it stops with the person who feels it. It only becomes powerful when it’s transferred—from a staff member to a kid, from that kid to a younger Club member, from a parent willing to trust an institution with their child’s future, all the way to a donor or community member who decides to invest in something they can’t yet fully see.
Think of it less like an inspirational quote and more like a chain reaction. Each link only works if the one before it actually caught.
- A Club existing in a neighborhood tells a kid, before a single program even starts, that they were worth building something for.
- A staff member showing up consistently, day after day, teaches a kid that this adult isn’t going anywhere and that they are here to create a safe space.
- An older Club Kid encouraging a younger one carries more weight than almost anything an adult can say, because it can’t be dismissed as something someone’s paid to do.
- A board member or donor choosing to invest isn’t funding a budget line. They’re joining something they’ve watched work.
That’s the whole model. Not charity, which asks people to feel sorry for a kid and write a check to relieve that feeling. Instead, a belief system, built on real data and real outcomes, that invites people to help build a future they believe is genuinely possible.
Pay It Forward, ©2000 Warner Bros.
A Pay-It-Forward Movement
If this idea sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen it before, just not in a nonprofit. It’s the same premise behind the movie Pay It Forward: a debt of goodwill that’s never repaid backward to the person who gave it, only passed forward to someone new, multiplying every time it moves.
That’s not a loose comparison for us. It’s structurally exact. A Club Kid doesn’t repay the staff member who believed in them; they pass that belief forward to the next kid, a parent, eventually a whole community. Nobody in this chain owes anybody anything. Everybody just passes it on, and it compounds.
I think that’s actually a more honest way to understand what we’re building than any campaign slogan could capture. We’re not asking anyone to pay us back for what a Club gave them. We’re asking them to pay it forward to whoever’s standing where they used to stand.
Raised by the Club: Proof You Can See
This week, we launched something that makes this idea impossible to miss: Raised by the Club, a regional initiative to document the full story of who has come through our Clubs across the Triad, and who they became.
It has two parts. First, a growing alumni database capturing the real, documented outcomes of Club Kids across the region: the professional and college athletes, the entrepreneurs and business leaders, the educators, nonprofit leaders, and social change innovators who got their start in a Club gym or classroom. Second, an annual BGCTriad Alumni Hall of Fame, inducting a class of the most accomplished alumni from across High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and beyond.
Why does this matter so much to me? Because a kid in a Club today doesn’t just need to be told they can become anything. They need to see someone who sat exactly where they’re sitting, and made it. A staff member can stand in front of a room and say “you can do this,” and that’s encouragement. But an alum standing at that same podium, having actually done it, is evidence. I know which one moved me more when I was that kid.
What This Means for You
This isn’t a campaign I’m asking you to watch from the sidelines. I’m inviting you into it, at whatever level makes sense for you:
If you’re a parent — trust that this is a place built to want something bigger for your child than even you may have had access to.
If you’re a former Club Kid — We want to hear from you. Your story is part of the proof this whole region needs to see.
If you’re a potential donor or community partner — this expansion, all of it, is being funded through the Future Ready Triad campaign, not by pulling from what already serves High Point and Asheboro. Every gift builds sustainability and represents new capacity to support a new young person.
If you’re simply a neighbor — believing out loud, telling a young person in your life that you see something in them, matters more than you probably think.
Belief is the one resource that multiplies the more it’s given away. That’s not a metaphor to me; it’s the operating model behind the largest active expansion currently underway anywhere in the BGCA network nationally, and I’m watching it work, one transfer at a time.
Want to be part of it? Visit Future Ready Triad to learn more, get involved with Raised by the Club, or find a Club near you.