Pushing for City’s Forgotten Kids at Boys & Girls Club of Harlem

Sharon Joseph believes that “in order to change communities, we have to start with young people.”

The Harlem native, who became the chief executive officer at the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem in 2022, said that of the K through 12th grade students they serve, 93 percent are from low income families and 33 percent are unhoused, and return to their shelters after the program ends. “A lot of those kids have never gone past 110th Street,” she said.

Although BGCH’s clubhouse is on West 145th Street, they also work in six public schools, helping with homework afterschool, bringing in mental health resources and offering extracurricular activities like chess, dance and STEM.

In the summer, they host a workforce training program, where 200 students will get paid $1,300 per week and learn about subjects such as finance and entrepreneurship, and get SAT tutoring and help with resume building and interviewing skills.

“We’re going to have a coffee shop lab where kids are going to learn how to run a coffee shop and we’ve partnered with a local bakery called Make My Cake, so the kids will learn to become baristas and how to run a business,” she explained.

“Other kids will learn how to build apps. Other kids will learn about media and technology and we have trips planned to television stations, banks and Google.”

Joseph studied international relations at Tufts and then international business at Columbia Business School and was working at Booz Allen Hamilton and Goldman Sachs prior to joining the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem.

Although she wasn’t looking for a job, a friend knew that she wanted to have more impact, particularly on youth, so sent her the job description, and the rest is history.

“I saw the Boys and Girls Club as an opportunity to deal with racial inequality,” she said. “But also to start preparing people to be better citizens and to show more kindness, because I think we need some more kindness in this world.”

In your own words, describe the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem’s mission.

To provide opportunities and resources to marginalized young people that they can have career opportunities and become contributing citizens to our community.

Explain BGCH’s setup- you have a clubhouse and work in six public schools.

Yes, and the reason why is that we believe that it’s important to create a safe environment for children and so, for working parents, they want to know that their kids are still at the school, but they have a place that they can go to. So we work with the public schools to complement a lot of the resources that they can’t bring. So in addition to afterschool, we bring social work interns to help with the social and emotional issues that the kids are dealing with. We bring chess, dance and STEM, where there may be gaps in the public school’s program. We bring trips that the kids wouldn’t otherwise go to. We bring Christmas gifts, food and mental health resources.

Do the kids get homework help?

In the afternoon afterschool, we give them academic support. The major thing that happens afterschool is that we help kids with their homework. Although I must say, I find it difficult to help with the new math. The other thing we work on is absenteeism, trying to help the families understand why it’s so important for kids to be at school, so giving incentives and little gifts for good attendance.

So 93 percent of the students are from low-income families and 33 percent are unhoused?

Yes, so that’s why the food that we provide becomes important and giving the kids afterschool snacks because they’re hungry. They eat lunch at 11 o’clock. They’re tired and hungry and that impacts their ability to do work.

What’s happening in the summer there?

For summer, we employ the teens. A lot of people talk about the gun violence, so I actually believe that in order to prevent things like that, you have to give the kids structured opportunities, especially the teens. So we have a workforce training program, it’s about six weeks, and we pay the kids to learn.

Can you tell us about some of your students?

We were recently featured both on Fox Business News and News 12 because two of our students, Louis Davis and Quamique Marcial – who were part of our programs as teens and we hired to become our youth development specialists in our summer programs–we recently got them internships with Roberts & Ryan, a brokerage firm on the New York Stock Exchange. Our Youth of the Year, Tristan Turner, he talked about in his speech that his brother was in jail and he wanted to make sure that he went on a different path and he’s now at college and doing really well and we’re going to try and get him an internship with an accounting firm. We have a young lady who came from Africa and could not even speak English, and now she’s going off to college and pursuing a career in nursing.

How does your background in finance help you in your role as chief executive officer there?

In finance, I spent a lot of time working on both strategy as well as financial literacy. I managed money for wealthy people and everything I did was about problem solving. In the last couple of years, we spent a lot of time looking at the racial inequality financially for not only black and brown people, but for women as well as the LGBTQ community. I spent a lot of time writing seminars and financial workshops talking about the fact that in terms of the structural inequalities, that it impacted all of those communities and Asian-American communities as well. And financial planning was also very different for them.

But the one thing that everyone had was that no one had talked about financial literacy early in their careers. So even my wealthiest executive would honestly say, “You know what? I have made this money, but I really don’t know what to do with it because it was never discussed.” Then, what I saw was that we were trying to give this one-size-fits-all financial solution and it just wasn’t the case. A lot of BIPOC communities take care of generational family members, so you have to take that into consideration. With the LGBTQ community, there is, “How do I save money for operations and hormonal treatments?”

How were you inspired by your mother?

When my mother, who was a nurse’s attendant in a psychiatric ward at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, died, so many people came to her funeral and talked about her impact on the community, especially young people. There were people who said she had helped them in their transitions, she encouraged them and had given them money to go to school, specifically single women like herself. One thing we both realized was that in order to change communities, we have to start with young people.

What are your future plans?

Unfortunately, because of some of the budget cuts that have taken place on a much larger scale, a major part of our funding was cut this year, putting some of our programs in jeopardy. So I am working to raise money to fill that gap and not close our school programs.

On July 17, a Spirits and Cigar Soirée will take place at the BGCH Clubhouse at 521 West 145th Street to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem.

To learn more, visit www.bgcharlem.org