READING, Pa. \u2013 Inside the Olivet Boys and Girls Club, a place many kids call home, nearly $500,000 in state funding has been awarded through Pennsylvania\u2019s Violence Intervention and Prevention program to expand efforts in Reading.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are just really lucky. There’s a lot of great things happening around the Olivet Boys and Girls Club right now,\u201d said Rick Perez, CEO of Olivet.<\/p>\n
State leaders, including Rep. Manny Guzman, helped bring that funding to Reading.<\/p>\n
And that money is going to a new initiative called EMPOWER Resilience, looking to help kids ages 5 to 18.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis just allows us and gives us a little more capacity and the resources necessary to go get another group of young men and young ladies that maybe we weren’t reaching in the best possible manner,\u201d Perez said.<\/p>\n
The program will focus on mentoring, job training, and after-school and summer activities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re on a mission to reach each and every one of our kids,\u201d Perez said. \u201cWe want to maintain that position of Champions of Possibility for our youth, and we’ll do whatever it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that mission follows a model that\u2019s worked in other cities like Operation Ceasefire in Boston, focusing on those after-school hours when youth violence tends to spike.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a club kid, so I understand that experience. You start to grow away from the club physically,\u201d Perez said. \u201cThe club is home. It’s always at your heart. But this gives us an opportunity now to program for them to come back to the club.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2013 Inside the Olivet Boys and Girls Club, a place many kids call home, nearly $500,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[75372,8320,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-167190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-empower-resilience","tag-olivet-boys-and-girls-club","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}