He Brings Sense of Mission to Boys and Girls Club

Jim Williams spent a career training Marines for combat. But after 60 days as the new executive director for the Boys and Girls Club of Capistrano Valley, he finds himself in one of the toughest field maneuvers since leaving Camp Pendleton.

“It’s tough, all right,” said Williams, 58, a retired colonel who left the Marines in 1989 after a 29-year career.

“Someone told me before I came here that it would be a big change. Well, I’ve had to use the Marines’ unofficial motto we got from Clint Eastwood’s ‘gunny’ [Sgt. Tom] Highway [role] in the movie, ‘Heartbreak Ridge’: ‘Improvise, overcome and adapt.’ ”

Williams inherited a Boys and Girls Club in financial trouble that is in a predominantly poor Latino area of San Juan Capistrano. While he believes the facility is on the front lines of today’s fight against youth crime, he said that for it to succeed, the club must change its focus in order to help market itself and seek new sources of revenue.

With four permanent employees, the club must raise at least $250,000 a year to pay for rent, its activities and payroll, which includes Williams’ $45,000-a-year salary. About 380 youths are club members.

Williams has received some criticism for not speaking Spanish, which some believe is mandatory for working with immigrant Latino youth. But Williams’ strength, say those who hired him, is his contacts from a former administrative job with a major South County development firm that hopefully can bring thousands of dollars into the club’s treasury.

Ken Friess, the club’s board president, acknowledged Williams’ lack of fluency in Spanish but said Williams, as former director of corporate relations for the Santa Margarita Co., established personal relationships with corporate executives, elected officials and major donors in South County.

“Yes, we do need someone with bilingual capabilities,” Friess said. “But what we need right now is somebody like Jim who can bring money into the facility. If we aren’t successful in fund-raising in the next year or two, there isn’t going to be a club.”

As his first order of business, Williams asked that an anti-gang agency now sharing the club’s quarters relocate.

Williams said the growing club needed the space. However, the agency suspected that its “gang” clients were a social stigma the club now wishes to erase to encourage broader appeal in the community. They are in the process of moving out.

The Boys and Girls Club will also focus on younger children from ages of 12 to 14, rather than on older teenagers, said board member Jeanne Workman.

Max Madrid, executive director for CSP Inc., the Irvine-based anti-gang agency that was asked to relocate, said he was disappointed with the club’s action.

“We’re really strongly connected to the community there and we want to stay there,” Madrid said. “I honestly thought we were working closely and successfully with the Boys and Girls Club.”

Madrid, whose agency receives $40,000 from the city to counsel an estimated 150 youth clients annually, said his agency originally moved its San Juan Capistrano branch to the club at the invitation of club officials two years ago. The agency did not pay any rent.

Officials at other Boys and Girls clubs, who are equally concerned with providing a safe, healthful environment, said they also do not allow gang members into their facilities.

“If you are a gang member and you want to change your ways, you are welcome at our club,” said San Clemente Mayor Steve Apodaca, who is the past president of that city’s Boys and Girls Club. “Any kind of gang behavior or gang attire, and you’re not welcome.”

Boys and Girls clubs traditionally establish centers in some of the most impoverished areas of the country, said David Sykes, a spokesman at the Boys and Girls Club regional office in Long Beach. The mission of the board of directors is to raise funds and keep youth fees low. Youth membership is $5 for the year at San Juan Capistrano.

Friess said San Juan Capistrano isn’t like Santa Ana or Irvine, where numerous corporations and other funding sources can be tapped.

“We don’t have that kind of a corporation base in San Juan,” he said.

Part of the problem has also been the club’s image and early focus, board members said.

The Boys and Girls Club was incorporated in 1991 after a disturbing rise in youth gangs and crime. Despite the serene beauty of the city that lies in a coastal valley,a street war had broken out between two Latino groups in neighboring cities.

In 1989, a 4-year-old girl was wounded by shotgun pellets as she stood on a balcony near gang members in San Clemente. A year later, a former gang member was gunned down in a San Clemente restaurant. It was the first gang homicide in the city’s 63-year history.

The club’s founding board of directors believed that a youth club could help by offering sports as a vehicle to encourage leadership and character development while focusing on stopping gangs.

“But we didn’t have the expertise,” Williams said. “We were responding to a gang intervention role that was needed in the community, but we were really too young as an organization.”

Williams and the board said the fight against youth gangs was draining the club’s budget, when the money could be better used for programs and more activities for a greater number of youths.

One of those is Alex Salinas, an 8-year-old who on a recent afternoon played games inside the club with about two dozen other youths.

“This is a good place,” Alex said, as he and his friend, Alex Romero, 9, shot a game of billiards.

Rather than be indoors, Diana Arce, 8, cavorted outside near a play area with eight of her girlfriends.

“I like playing on the swings and getting water and making mud out of the dirt,” she said, laughing.

Williams hopes to broaden the club’s fund-raising base, adding that he finds himself in an ironic position. As a former corporate relations executive, he had the enviable job of distributing thousands of dollars from four charitable foundations that aided numerous South County community organizations, including the Boys and Girls Club.

Now, he is on the other end.

“It definitely is different now that I’m sitting in this office,” Williams said.

“But I really like it here. It’s not a facility where you just throw out a basketball. We want to train leadership skills. I really believe we can succeed here.”