User:Fundadejo/sandbox

Boy With a Ball Global is an international faith-based youth, family and community development organization dedicated to reaching young people and developing them as leaders in cities across the world. The organization was founded in San Antonio, Texas in 2001 by a combination of educators, professionals, clergy, and former gang members with personal experience in working with the problems that compel children to leave home, leave school, commit crimes and engage in all sorts of other high risk behaviors.

The following decade saw the organization expand beyond San Antonio to found local organizations in San Jose, Costa Rica and Managua, Nicaragua while establishing Boy With a Ball Global as a convening intermediary organization.

Boy With a Ball Global now works to develop innovative programs, to found, equip and support local youth development organizations, to weave these organizations into communities of practice and to advocate for best practices in regards to developing young people. In all of this work, their main focus is reaching and developing young people to become grassroots movements that can help communities emerge from poverty.

Contents

1 History

2 The Name

3 Theory of Change

4 Community Development Approach

5 Local Organizations

6 Communities of Practice

7 Funding

8 The Institute for International Youth Development

9 See Also

10 References

11 External Links

History

Boy With a Ball began as nineteen year old Jamie Johnson's vision in 1990 to build a highly-effective international youth development organization around a team-based approach.

Johnson had emerged out of a difficult adolescence in Mesa, AZ and Orlando, FL and had seen his life change with the help of a pastor who connected with him and helped his life turn around with the help of a one-to-one mentoring relationship and supportive small groups within a small church. While still in high school, Johnson began to turn and try to help other young people facing adversity and, as a result, was identified as an emerging young leader and sent across the U.S. to intern with successful youth development programs in inner city Pittsburgh, PA, Houston and Mobile, AL.

In 1992, Johnson married his current wife, Kathy, who herself had faced a problematic youth that included living in the ball pit of a McDonald's Playland, incarceration and more. The couple spent the next six years learning to face their own internal issues, again with the help of mentoring and supportive small group community settings. Throughout this period of personal recovery, the Johnsons continued working with other young people including serving as staff in summer camps and volunteering with church youth programs and street outreach programs.

Gradually, they began to meet young people coming out of a long list of high-risk situations and found that their own experiences proved instrumental to seeing these young people not only survive their pasts but to grow to be highly-effective youth workers who could turn and help other young people.

In 1998, after having moved to San Antonio, Texas, the Johnsons began working with a group of Trinity University students, many of whom were working towards receiving Master's in Education degrees and had a strong interest in youth development. By 2000, a handful of these young leaders had joined the Johnsons in forming a team dedicated to developing young people in San Antonio. In 2001, Boy With a Ball was founded as a non-profit organization and began working with young people across the city including military bases, churches, camps and on the streets of the city's south side. Over time, this original team expanded to include many of the young people the organization had reached and developed.

In 2004, the organization launched into San Jose, Costa Rica with the hope of learning how to develop Boy With a Ball's capacity to found local, indigenously-led international organizations. El Nino y la Bola Costa Rica's (Boy With a Ball Costa Rica's) efficacy in reaching and developing young people on the streets, in squatter's settlements, in churches and in the country's finest international schools led to the organization expanding into Managua and the island of Ometepe, Nicaragua while relaunching Boy With a Ball in San Antonio in early 2010. That same year, Boy With a Ball Global was launched as a separate youth, family and community development organization that could help support the development of local Boy With a Ball organizations as the group looked to expand across the world.

The Name

Boy With a Ball's ambiguous name came out of the organization's belief that young people would be better drawn to "a story" than to "a crusty old acronym." In 2001, as the initial Boy With a Ball team was being formed, one of the founding member’s sons, Joey, was four years old and had become fixed to a red kickball that he carried around as a security object. Joey took the ball everywhere he went: To the grocery store, to church, on his family vacations. One day around the time the organization was searching for a name, the ball slipped out of the boy's hands and bounced into the hands of his father.

His dad bounced the ball to Joey. Joey caught it and threw it back. His dad threw it again and the two found themselves in the midst of Joey’s very first game of catch. The organization picked up on the importance of a little boy's playing catch with his father for the first time and the affirmation and connectedness it provides a young boy. At that point, according to the organization's literature, a light came on in Joey's head that "swept across his face and you could almost see him thinking, 'I have had this ball in my hands all this time, only knowing how to do a few cute tricks when all the while it was capable of something as amazing as this!'"

The organization saw Joey as an example of the 1.8 billion young people across the globe who "have their lives in their hands but who have no idea of their full potential. Boy With a Ball teams and team members walk into the young person’s life and teach them how to see that life do the unthinkable.  We then are given front rows seats for the amazing experience of seeing them say, 'I have had this life in my hands all this time and I never knew it was capable of something as amazing as this!'”

This name has proven problematic for the organization in newer markets as it often times leads to Boy With a Ball being seen as a youth sports organization or an organization that works only with male children. The name did prove to be effective crossing cultural boundaries and retaining its meaning in Latin America.

Theory of Change

From the beginning Boy With a Ball was built around the practices that had proven most effective in the lives of the young leaders who comprised the early team. These team members had seen mentoring and small groups provide the support, hope and counsel necessary to provide a slight shift in their context that proved instrumental and even catalytic in changing their behaviors from high risk to healthy. Beyond mentoring and small groups, the organization also found that young people who were struggling themselves to escape difficult life situations were drawn to engaging in outreach efforts to other at risk youth as they were mentored and drawn into small groups. The adventure and emotional impact of being given the opportunity to make a difference in a team setting while receiving the individual care and relational connection of small groups proved effective in their lives in helping them move quickly from being "at-risk" to functioning as positive and effective leaders.

In 2005, this methodology was defined as Boy With a Ball's "theory of change" and was described as: Teams, Outreach, Mentoring, Small Groups and Equipping or "T.O.M.S.E.". Boy With a Ball began building all of its programs around drawing volunteers and staff into teams that would go together repeatedly into neighborhoods or settings filled with young people and build relationships with them. These relationships would be continually deepened until the young person and their family could be drawn into one-to-one mentoring that could help them either "accomplish their dreams" or to overcome difficulties in their lives like learning to get a job, tutoring for school, working through a difficult relationship for a child with their parent or a parent with their child. As numerous instances of individuals facing similar situations were identified, they were drawn into small groups with others facing their same struggles so that they could support each other as they learned to overcome them. In this way, these mentoring relationships and small groups were used as platforms from which individuals could be developed socio-emotionally, in their identity, cognitively, occupationally and academically and as community leaders capable of helping others.

By 2009, the "TOMSE Method" as it was called had shown demonstrable results in the El Triangulo Squatter's settlement, just north of San Jose, Costa Rica being developed to a point that the 2005 population level of 3,000 people had been decreased to 1,800 individuals. This meant that 40% of the community had "made it out" and into mainstream Costa Rican culture. Additionally, the average level of education rose from a third to a sixth grade level, gangs were eliminated and, for the first time in the history of the community, a small group of students were able to graduate from high school and begin college.

This proven success was noticed by the U.S. State Department who awarded Boy With a Ball Global and El Nino y la Bola Costa Rica a major grant within the CARSI-Merida Initiative funding that focused on combatting drug trafficking by reaching and developing at-risk youth across Central America.