We’re Back in Winston-Salem, And This is Just the Beginning

 

By Dr. William D. Gibson, President & CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Greater Triad

 

Last month, our staff stood inside the Minnie Lee Davis Harris Club and watched a group of teenagers walk through the doors like they’d been coming there for years. They hadn’t. Most of them had only known this Club since late July, when we opened our doors for a Town Hall and an open house and asked Winston-Salem families to take a chance on something new. But by the time full-time after-school programming officially began this week, those same teens walked in like they owned the place.

In a way, they do. That’s the whole point.

The Minnie Lee Davis Harris Club is our seventh Club site, and it marks something we’ve been working toward for more than a year: bringing Boys & Girls Clubs back to Winston-Salem. This Club is different from most of ours—it’s a dedicated Teen Center, built exclusively for teenagers, located at 2020 E 14th Street in partnership with Parks & Recreation. That’s intentional. Teens are too often an afterthought in youth development. We wanted a space built for them, and only them.

Getting here took longer than a summer. It took more than a year of listening—to families, to City leaders, to pastors, coaches, and community leaders who kept telling us the same thing in different words: Winston-Salem’s young people needed a place to belong, and they needed it now. We spent the last week of July introducing ourselves properly: a community Town Hall, neighborhood canvassing, and an open house where families could walk the halls, meet our club director, and register their teens. Through August, we ran limited summer programming, on purpose—because trust isn’t something you launch. You build it, one conversation, one registration, one afternoon at a time. That groundwork is why, when we finally opened our doors for full-time programming this week, it didn’t feel like a grand opening. It felt like a homecoming.

Another reason this Club matters right now is worth saying plainly, because people keep asking me: why now? On January 1, 2025, the longstanding affiliation between the Salvation Army and Boys & Girls Clubs of America ended, closing the door on decades of Boys & Girls Club-branded programming delivered through that partnership in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and neighboring communities. That left a real gap—safe, structured places for teens to go after the school day ends—in communities that had relied on them for years. So many other organizations and faith communities across Winston-Salem have stepped up to fill this gap, and now we are joining their effort to meet the need. The Minnie Lee Davis Harris Club, and the two more Winston-Salem Clubs we’re already planning, are BGCTriad’s contribution: reestablishing a direct, chartered Boys & Girls Club presence in the communities that need it, so the mission doesn’t skip a beat for the young people counting on it.

I want to be honest about why this Club matters so much. Winston-Salem is a city we care about deeply, and it’s also a city where every young person deserves more; where too many of our young people are growing up with the odds stacked against them before they’ve had a fair shot to stack anything themselves. This spring, our community felt that reality in the most painful way possible, with a tragic loss of life that shook families across the city and put a hard, urgent question in front of all of us: what are we going to do about it?

I don’t believe any one organization answers that question alone. This Club exists because BGCTriad, the City of Winston-Salem, and a growing coalition of local nonprofits and community-based organizations decided to answer it together. We’re working every day to tighten the net of support around Winston-Salem families, connecting our work with theirs, so a family that walks through our doors doesn’t hit a dead end if what they need is somewhere else in that net. I don’t use that metaphor lightly. It’s the model.

Here’s what I believe, because I was a Club kid myself: a safe space and one caring adult can be the hinge point that changes a young person’s entire trajectory. Whether they graduate. Whether they find a real path into the workforce. Whether they break a cycle instead of repeating one they never chose. That’s economic mobility in its most human form; not a line item in a report, but a teenager who had a place to go on a Tuesday afternoon instead of nowhere at all. The data backs this up: Boys & Girls Club membership is linked to higher graduation rates, stronger workforce readiness, and a meaningfully lower likelihood of juvenile justice involvement. But we didn’t need the data to believe it. I needed to grow up in a Club myself, and I need to walk into the Minnie Lee Davis Harris Club and watch our Teen Center Director, JaQuon Moore, in action.

“Our teens started showing up this summer, as word got out, because they were hungry for a place that’s truly theirs,” JaQuon said recently. “Starting full-time programming this week means we can finally give them the consistency they’ve been asking for: a safe space, caring mentors, and a Club they can count on every single day.”

That consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because our Regional Director of Club Operations, Nadia Obiesie, and her team treated this launch like the disciplined, deliberate build it needed to be. “Standing up a new Club site takes relationship-building, disciplined planning, and an incredible team,” Nadia said. “We built this launch step by step, so that when we opened our doors for full-time programming, our staff, our systems, and our community relationships were ready. That’s how we ensure every Club we open is built to last.”

Built to last. That’s the standard, because Winston-Salem deserves more than a symbolic reopening—it deserves a Club that’s still standing, still full of teenagers, still changing trajectories a decade from now. That’s why the Minnie Lee Davis Harris Club is only the beginning of our commitment to this city. We already have two more Winston-Salem Club sites on the horizon before the end of this fiscal year, part of a broader regional expansion that’s now the largest of its kind anywhere in the Boys & Girls Clubs of America movement—growing toward 25 to 30 Club sites and more than 9,000 youth served across the Greater Triad by 2030.

None of that happens without partners. If you’re a community leader, a business, or a philanthropic partner who believes Winston-Salem’s teens deserve a place that’s truly theirs, I’m asking you to join us — through investment, through program partnership, through showing up and volunteering your time. The net of support we’re building only gets stronger with more hands holding it. It takes a village.

I keep coming back to that image of teenagers walking into a building they’d only known for a few weeks, like they already belonged there. That’s not luck, and it’s not an accident. That’s what happens when a community decides, together, that every young person deserves a champion and a place to become who they’re capable of becoming.

Welcome back, Winston-Salem. We’re just getting started.