Benefiting a needy child in classroom or family is not a typical purpose of the NGO activity. Despite this fact, Boys & Girls Club of Benton County is a rare exception to this rule.
Boys & Girls Club declares that its mission is to enable and inspire the youth for them to realize their full potential. The NGO suggests learning, playing, socializing, and development of adults’ skills. Such purposes serve school-age children providing out-of-school development and family support programs.
Boys & Girls Club offers both programs and athletics for adults. These opportunities aim at developing them and preparing young leaders for the communities. Physical Fitness and Nutrition Education consists of a game plan for the Mind, Body and Soul. The Body game plan pursues the objective of healthy children by conducting individual endurance trials and the athletic programs. There are four of them: Football, Volleyball, Basketball, and Cheerleading. The Mind game plan develops adults’ knowledge on health and smart food choices. This program embraces the Healthy Habits course for nutrition education. The Soul game plan implements sportsmanship ideas in the social leisure activities stressing on mental and psychological aspects of competition. Health Prevention and Protection by Boys & Girls Club consists of dental screening for oral hygiene of club members. Educational constituent states that support for in-school learning enables young people to be successful in studying. It consists of Project Learn and Preparing for Career and Post-Secondary education. The first one covers children, while the second deals with adults. The possibility to have Club as the first workplace effectively strengthens help delivered to the adults. Children’s life skills get developed due to the program with the same name; the aforesaid plan aims at preventing alcohol, tobacco and drug addiction (SMART Moves), developing the girls’ needs (S.M.A.R.T. Girls) and males’ issues (Passport to Manhood). One of the most important fields of the NGO activities is charity. Food, School Backpack Program, Shoes for Kids, as well as different scholarships, are the best examples of this policy.
Taking into consideration all of the abovementioned programs, it is worth mentioning that such initiatives as Boys & Girls Club of Benton County help children to develop their knowledge, become physically healthy and even receive financial support.