Region’s largest Boys & Girls Club opens near stadium
From their apartment balcony a few blocks west of Camping World Stadium, 10-year-old twins Bella and Millie Donald-Stanley watched the first bulldozers start to transform a field of grass and weeds.
That was a year ago.
On Friday, they watched as civic leaders cut a ceremonial ribbon on a $9 million, 30,000-square-foot Boys & Girls Club — Central Florida’s largest — and talked about the dance studio, science projects and new friends that awaited them.
“Everyone at school — they’re all excited,” Millie said. “We can’t wait.”
Officially the Jacqueline Bradley & Clarence Otis Family Branch in West Lakes, the facility is named after Otis, the retired Darden Restaurants CEO, and his wife, both longtime supporters of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. They donated the initial $4 million to get the project off the ground, giving kids in the historically Black neighborhood what many described as a place of healing and promise.
“When you have a chance to liberate a child spirit, or help others, you must,” Bradley said, addressing a small, socially-distanced crowd of supporters.
A striking cream-colored, stone and glass structure, the new club anchors a corner of the burgeoning West Lakes community near the stadium, across from Orange Center Elementary School, where Millie and Bella attend. The neighborhood is undergoing a large-scale redevelopment effort, led by nonprofit Lift Orlando and local residents, to spur overall well-being in what was once Orlando’s most distressed ZIP code.
The club will provide space for more than 250 kids, ages 6 to 18, with study rooms, a full gymnasium, tech labs, a dance studio
and an art studio.
Most critically, said David Brewer, a retired vice admiral of the United States Navy and former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, it will give kids the means to overcome the lure of street gangs and the waste of their enormous potential.
“Our children are being recruited in the fifth grade, between the hours of 4 and 7 [p.m.], and then in the summer,” said Brewer, who grew up in the neighborhood and lives there now.
“And the only antidote to that is to take them off of the streets” and provide them with guidance and opportunity.
Otis, who grew up amid gang territories in Los Angeles, agreed. “I went to elementary school with the founders of the Crips…. Back in the day, I played football with the founders of the Bloods. And it’s easy to demonize those guys. But I know that they were people that had incredible leadership skills, enormous charisma, and contrary to a lot of popular belief … they were students that excelled in school. But there was something missing in their life. And what was missing is what the Boys & Girls Club provides.”
The club will officially open to kids on April 12, a day that Gary Cain, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida, said he eagerly awaits.
“You can either build prisons or you can build Boys & Girls Clubs and invest in children,” he said. “A lot of our kids have experienced very traumatic events in their young lives, and some of them have never really belonged to anything. Here, we build the relationships that help them heal and flourish.”