Source: The Denver Post
When Jason Martinez had to start turning kids away from the Boys & Girls Club because there was no room, it became imperative to expand.
“There is a huge need for a Boys & Girls Club in this community,” said Martinez, who is manager and founder of the Boys & Girls Club in Commerce City. “In the eight years that we’ve been here, we’ve seen about 2,800 kids.”
Two weeks ago, the Suncor Boys & Girls Club officially opened its doors to its new standalone facility at 6201 Holly St.
The new 2.5-acre site means the club can handle double its former capacity, which is fortuitous as enrollment is already climbing.
“There are tons of new faces here every day,” said Martinez, who has worked with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver for 18 years. “Attendance at the old site was about 130 to 150 daily. Now I’m at least 200 every day. It shows that the community really wants and needs us.”
The 20,000-square-foot facility is the first development on the former Greyhound Park site, and it was built to give a dedicated home to the hundreds of Commerce City students who visited the club at 6160 Kearney St. every year since it opened in 2007.
It costs $2 a year to be member of the Suncor Boys & Girls Club. The new club is five minutes away from its old site at Kearney Middle School.
“At Kearney, we had the shared space with the school district, which was awesome because they gave us that room,” Martinez said. “But there were many instances where the school needed to use their cafeteria or their gym, so the challenge there was not being able to have consistent programming.”
“And now that we have our own building, we can have consistent programming day and night, with special events on the weekends, too.”
In 2013, the Commerce City club served 740 kids at Kearney. That’s about half as many kids as other Boys & Girls Clubs in metro Denver typically serve. Between the organization’s first and second years in the city, membership grew by 30 percent.
“The students are beyond excited. They just wander all over, trying everything,” Martinez said.
The Suncor club is modern and spacious. It has an education center, a game space with pool tables and foosball tables, a full gymnasium, a technology lab, an arts room, a STEM lab, a massive teen center, and a kids café with a nutritional teaching kitchen.
A 54-foot by 120-foot, $120,000 outdoor Futsal course was also donated over the summer by the Colorado Rapids and the USA Soccer Foundation as part of the Major League Soccer All Star Game hosted at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park.
And Commerce City is already working on a plan to give the club an additional land donation so it can build a full sports field, which would add an additional 10,000 square feet to the site, said Gail Bransteitter, spokeswoman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver.
Funding for the nearly $5 million Boys & Girls Club capital campaign began in 2011 with a $1 million grant from Suncor Refinery.
“Our community investment strategy is helping our neighborhood communities grow, thrive and be sustainable,” said Nancy Thonen, director of product supply and refinery sales at Suncor Refinery. “That’s why this particular partnership with the Boys & Girls Club is so important to us.”
The rest of the money came from a $250,000 capital commitment from Commerce City, a $166,000 U.S. Housing & Urban Development appropriation from Rep. Ed Perlmutter and donations from community members. The city has appropriated an annual operating budget of $80,000 for maintenance and upkeep of the new club.
“This club has had an immense impact on my life,” said Karol Martinez, 16, who has been a member of the Commerce City Boys & Girls Club since it opened in 2007. “Being here taught me that I will be someone, somewhere doing something great someday … I am so excited for the future generations who get to grow up in this club.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Mmitchelldp