Emily Gee and Marci Rubin of the Boys & Girls Club of Mercer County in the game room at the organization’s new Spruce Street Community Center. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
Emily Gee and Marci Rubin go over plans in anticipation of the opening of the Boys & Girls Clubs’ new Spruce Street Community Center. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
By Aliza Alperin-Sheriff
When the Boys & Girls Club of Mercer County’s new Spruce Street Community Center open its doors on Sept. 2, it will be a place tailor-made for teens in the area.
The community center, which is located at 1040 Spruce St. in Lawrence, near the Trenton Farmers Market, was built to expand the club’s programs, with several offerings made to serve Ewing and Lawrence townships.
The center will host a pre-school, an after-school program for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, activities for teenagers and specialty programming open to kids and adults alike.
One of the most important aspects of the new facility is that it has space meant for teenagers. Because the Club’s current facility in Trenton is full to capacity with younger students attending its after school program, activities for teenagers had to be relegated to the evening, when afterschool programming was over for the day.
“Even if we had the ability to get more kids into the space, we didn’t have just teen spaces. Teens were sharing tables and chairs that kindergarteners and first graders would use,” said Dave Anderson, the president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Mercer County.
In contrast, the Spruce Street building will have many rooms designed and designated for teenagers including a café, a college and career center, a classroom and lounge. Each of these rooms was designed to look like it belongs on a college campus. For example, the college and career center is intended to look like the first floor of a college library and the lounge is resembles a student union building.
Anderson said the concept is to have a place that high school-age kids can perceive as a community college for high school students. “If nothing else is going on in town, this is a spot they can come and see something for teens,” he said.
“It’s very cool. It gives us more room to be teens and hang out versus being at our old club where we didn’t get to have much of a teen kind of vibe,” said Gary Lawery, a 17 year old who has been involved with the Boys & Girls Clubs since first grade.
Lawery, a former resident of Trenton, currently lives in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where he is about to begin his senior year at Pennsbury High School. Even after moving, Lawery remains very active at the Boys & Girls Club.
Among other involvement, he is the president of the Midas Keystone Club, a leadership program for teenagers, and a member of the Teen Advisory Group, a cohort of approximately 30 to 35 local teenagers who will plan and host activities like dances, open mic nights and karaoke at the new club.
The Boys & Girls Club was founded as the Boys Club of Trenton in 1937 and serves approximately 2,300 kids ever year at its Centre Street facility in Trenton and at programs at several of the city’s elementary schools. About eight years ago, the organization looked to open a new community center to serve approximately 2,000 more kids annually.
“We were at capacity for the number of kids we could serve in one building,” said Emily Gee, the associate director of marketing for the Club. “It was very concentrated in the Trenton area and we wanted another space to serve kids from Ewing, Lawrenceville, Hamilton—all over Mercer. We also wanted a dedicated teen space.”
The Club has been fundraising for the new facility since 2010 and just finishing up its capital campaign. In addition to raising money from individuals, there have been several high-end donors including Novo Nordisk, the Johnson Community Foundation and Nordson Corporation.
However, for an organization like the Boys & Girls Clubs, which is dedicated to helping children, especially those who are underserved, reach their full potential, fundraising never really ends.
“One of our challenges while raising money for the building is that while program fees help with operating costs, many kids in Ewing and Lawrence need financial assistance to attend,” said Anderson.
To that end, the organization is holding a grand opening reception for the Spruce Street Community Center called “A Taste of Ewing and Lawrence.” The reception is set for Sept. 30 from 6 to 9 p.m.
“We’re really trying to get our name out in the community,” said Gee. “It’s not a ribbon cutting, but a way for community members to come see the building and celebrate with us. It’s more of a fundraising event to raise scholarship dollars for Ewing and Lawrence youth.”
The evening will feature food from local restaurants, a silent auction and music.
The new center is a 35,000-square-foot space designed specifically to accommodate the multifaceted services offered by the Club.
The building was originally a 30,000-square-foot building owned by a company called Melcor that had a patent on a product that went into rooftop heating and air conditioning. Melcor was bought out for its patent rights before the 2008 recession and the building has been sitting empty for almost seven years.
The Boys & Girls Club completely renovated and retrofitted the building, keeping only the concrete floors and steel beam skeleton, and added a 5,000-square-foot gymnasium.
The current building is shaped like a figure eight with rooms for the after school program on one end, teenagers on the other and flex space for specialty programs in the middle. The building has the capacity for 510 children at any given time.
About 275 of those children will be attending the after school program for students from kindergarten to eighth grade. The kids will be divided into homerooms and will rotate to different rooms to participate in a wide variety of activities.
There is a cooking room with stainless steel tables where younger children will learn to cook with microwaves and toaster ovens (older children and adults may choose to sign up for cooking classes in the center’s commercial kitchen). They will also learn about nutrition and wellness.
“[Cooking] is a great life skill that many kids don’t learn,” said Anderson.
There is a STEM center, outfitted with workbenches, 3-D printers and laser cutters, where hands-on learning is key.
“If you take biology in college, everybody is bored in lecture, but has fun in lab. This is like lab,” said Anderson.
Other rooms include an art studio, a karate studio, a technology center and an arcade and Xbox lounge open to all club members for free during open hours.
Many aspects of the after school program are run in conjunction with the Boys & Girls Club’s community partners. For example, the Rutgers 4-H Youth Development of Mercer County will help run the STEM center and Artworks Trenton will help run the art studio. The community partners also offer specialty programming in a variety of disciplines including theater, drama, art, music, sports, dance and martial arts.
Anderson said that working with community partners allows the center to offer a wide variety of activities because it spreads the risk and therefore the Boys & Girls Club doesn’t have to cover the entirety of funding.
When planning the new building, the Boys & Girls Club did a gap analysis to see what services might be lacking Ewing and Lawrence. One thing the organization discovered in the process was that there were almost no career preparation programs for teenagers not just in Ewing and Lawrence, but throughout the county and even nationwide.
The new facility seeks to rectify that with space and programs dedicated specifically for career preparation. Every Tuesday from 6:30 to 8 p.m., the career center will host career clubs that feature guest speakers.
In addition to speaking about their professions, their companies and their personal career paths, the speakers will bring practical examples for students to engage with. For example, a human resources employee might task attendees to craft an HR policy based on a new law.
“That information and experience is not available to most high school students,” said Anderson.
Another way that teens will have to learn about careers is to gain experience by completing internships.
A student who is interested in entering the food industry would be able to earn a safe serve certification and work in the club café. One who is more interested in business could work at the café’s counter to learn about customer service and points of sale. Other internships offered include working at the club store, at the facility’s front desk, and at Razor Sharp Barber Shop.
The new building will also host three social entrepreneurial businesses: a computer exchange, a bike exchange and a print shop to create t-shirts, signs and trophies.
The club offers internships at each of these businesses for students interested in design, bike repair and computer repair, as well as providing more place for students interested in customer service and points of sale.
The businesses are open to the public and any proceeds come back to the club. The print shop is particularly important because it helps self-fund any T-shirts, signs and trophies that any other program at the Boys & Girls Club may need.
Anderson said that part of the reason that the new center will have an arcade and a teen lounge is to encourage teenagers to come and hang out at the club.
“Our job is then to get them into other programming,” he said.
For example, if a teenager shows up to the lounge every day to hang out and use the club’s wi-fi, a staff member might approach him and ask which of the career club lectures sound interesting and encourage him to attend.
Overall, the new facility is equipped to make sure that as many children as possible can have the kind of positive and growth-filled experiences that Lawery has had over the past 11 years.
“The club has always been a home away from home for me,” he said. “It’s very welcoming, very comfortable. People are interested in what’s going on with my life, how I’m going to move forward with my life and other things I’m going to do in the future.”
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