Following up on our article A Little Change Can Make a Big Change, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Clara Valley feels it is important for the community to know how the kid’s coin bank project is working. As readers may recall, the kids of the Las Piedras Clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Clara Valley, in response to the inaccurate news that the Clubs may have been closing in late November, chose to take the matter into their own hands and started a coin bank to ‘help keep their Club open.” Fast forward now to last Friday, December 11th, when Mari Juarez, the site director at the Las Piedras Clubhouse, took the coins collected by the Club’s members to a local coin counting machine and discovered that in a short 10 days the kids had collected $78 in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters! What a great success story for the members! They took matters into their own hands and gained the satisfaction that they were able to help keep “The Positive Place for Kids” open for their use.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America, our National Affiliate, has a acronym B.U.I.C, its stands for Belongingness, Usefulness, Influence and Competence and Mari tells us that through this coin collection our kids feel that they Belong to the club and something special, they are feeling Useful because they are able contribute, they feel they are influential and can make a difference and they are empowered by the thought that they are competent because they have the ability to help! Taking their cue from this fine example, the other four Clubhouses in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Clara Valley system, the Santa Paula Clubhouse (on Harvard Blvd.,) the Fillmore Clubhouse on First Street in Fillmore, the North Fillmore/Neil C. Schmidt Clubhouse in Fillmore and the Rancho Sespe Clubhouse at the Rancho Sespe Apartments between Fillmore and Piru, have adopted this project at each of their own sites. We encourage readers to look forward to another coin collection update from this and the other sites of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Clara Valley. Individuals and businesses that are interested in starting their own coin collection for the Clubs are encouraged to contact the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Clara Valley at 805-525-7910 to obtain a collection bucket for use are home or at work.