Boys and Girls Club has served community from 1988-2018

Published 3:00 pm Saturday, December 15, 2018

When 7-year-old Mark Wiggins’ mother packed him up for a move from Sandersville to Milledgeville, he had a penchant for mischief and no friends in his new city. He remembers riding by the Boys & Girls Club of Baldwin and Jones County location on West Charlton Street with her when they first arrived in town. Little did he know, the programs and activities — and people there — would shape his life for the better.

“My mother wanted me to get some child-to-child interaction. She saw the Boys & Girls Club, so she quickly enrolled me in it,”  Wiggins said recently from inside the club’s activity center, with mentor and current CEO Pamela Peek sitting nearby. “It’s how I know most people in Milledgeville, Ga. — at some point, they came through the Boys & Girls Club,” 

Wiggins attended the club throughout his youth, later becoming a volunteer in high school. The club awarded him Youth of the Year for Baldwin and Jones County in 2013.

Now a successful young adult who graduated high school in 2014, Wiggins works part-time as a Youth Development Professional at the organization that he says changed his life. 

Peek, or just Miss Pam, as almost everyone calls her, has worked with youth at the local club for the majority of its 30 years of existence. Wiggins is one of the thousands that she has seen flourish.

“To be exact, about 9,137 was my last count of how many different children in the Baldwin and Jones county community whose lives we’ve touched in some way, form or fashion,” said Peek.

In many cases, children come to the club at a young age for its productive after-school activities that put a focus on education and discipline with fun and games included and then graduate to volunteering when they hit high school.

“What we have found out is that the kids that stay with us the longest are the children that tend to be more fruitful or productive as they get older,” Peek said.

Peek became interim CEO in 2016 and started full-time in the position last year, but got started at the club fresh out of college in 1992 as it made a transition from just a “boys club” to a “boys and girls” club. She’s seen it grow since then, but it had even humbler beginnings.

“It actually started in 1985, not the club being open, but the volunteers trying to get one started,” remembers former CEO Paul Bernard. “It started in 1985, and Dr. Hugh Sanders was the president of that volunteer board. I was the full-time executive that came on three years later in 1988 and got it going and open.”

Bernard said he decided to help bring the new club into existence — even though that meant more responsibility and only a slightly higher salary than his then-current Boys Club job in Gadsden, Ala.

“Most clubs have an executive director and two or three other full-time people to help — you know, program directors and all these other things to go with it, but we only had one,” Bernard said. “And we had a condemned building, and I didn’t even have a paperclip when I started.”

That condemned building turned out to have a solid frame, and with work, served its purpose, and still stands across the street from the main building as the club’s education center.

And now, although the club can use all the support it can get, there’s plenty of money for paperclips. 

From its inception, the budget increased from around $30,000, which was mostly earmarked for Bernard’s salary, to more than $300,000, when Bernard retired in 2016, he said. The money comes from a variety of sources, including community support. A Jones County Unit was added in 1998, and a staff of unit directors and additional employees join Peek in serving the community.

“It’s just important now as it always has been,” said Bernard. “People who are single parents, or in some cases, even foster care, or grandparents raising them. Whatever the issues are, the kids need a place that they have a sense of belonging to — ownership of that.”

For Wiggins, that sense of belonging and the discipline that came with it, kept him on the straight and narrow. When he got into trouble, Peek made him write out what he did wrong — over and over again, and he would miss out on camaraderie with the other kids until he did.

“Miss Pam, her nephew came up here. Me and him were pretty close and we always got into trouble. First, we (would) get timeout. And if it kept happening, that’s when they gave us sentences. I tell you, writing the same thing 500 times gets boring,” Wiggins remembers.

For Peek, being tough on the kids has paid dividends. She’s seen them in Wiggins’ life, and keeps countless other stories of success as rewards for her commitment — from doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs, to simply productive members of society holding down full-time jobs and providing for their families.

“You see how they’re now thriving, and they tell you that it was a result of what you were doing,” Peek said. “That really brings you much joy.”

“They have changed my life. You can ask so many people in the community and they know Miss Pam and (Baldwin Unit Director) Miss Michelle (Adams). They know them. Even if they haven’t been through here, they know their reputation,” Wiggins said. “If it wasn’t for the Boys & Girls Club, I would say I’d have a different mindset than I have now. If it wasn’t for them getting on me when I got in trouble, I don’t know where I would be. I would probably be a bum, probably — a bum.”