Boys & Girls Clubs shift focus to support Upvalley families
By Dave Stoneberg
NAPA VALLEY, Calif. – Quietly and without fanfare, the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga provide a safety net for up-valley families.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, they served thousands of meals prepared by the staffs at PRESS, Gott’s Roadside Café and other businesses to families when the parents lost their jobs.
For the past six or seven years club officials have offered teens mental-health retreats, which are held twice a year, during spring break and in the summer. Some 25 to 30 teens go into the woods near Ashland, Oregon, live in cabins and go through mental-health exercises as well as ride mountain bikes and go hiking.
“We give them a mental-health toolkit, how to notice the triggers, how to deal with anxiety,” said Trent Yaconelli, the group’s executive director. These retreats are very expensive, about $1,000 a student, and everything is paid for, transportation, food and housing.”
Last year during the club’s major annual fundraising event, The Big Night, the audience was asked to raise their paddles to pay for the camps, and they did, to the tune of $110,000 for the camps alone.
“People were super generous,” Yaconelli said.
During the event teens who had attended the camps spoke to the audience about how important they are. The clubs offer mental-health training for all their members, down to age 6.
“We’re doing all this stuff about gratitude as a way to get kids grounded and centered,” he added. “The Big Night is the engine that funds all of that and allows us not to be so dependent on grants and foundations.”
Yaconelli talked about the beautiful thing that is The Big Night.
“There’s a sense of connection,” he said. “If you take care of the grapes, you get good wine. If you take care of your workers, the guys who pick the grapes and do the other work, that care works its way up the chain. The people who raise their paddles understand that. These are the sons and daughters of the people who work in the winery, who work in the industry.”
He added that those in the audience want these kids to be happy and healthy and do well.
“That’s the vibe of The Big Night,” he said.
$1 million annually
For the past three years The Big Night has raised $1 million annually. Last year the $1.1 million raised during the event helped to provide mental-health support to members and teens; provide scholarships for membership, programming, sports or field trips; distribute financial support for club families in need; accommodate teen retreats, college tours and field trips; purchase furniture and game room updates throughout the five facilities; enhance post-COVID programming; and upgrade clubhouse safety measures and technology.
The Big Night is Aug. 19
The 2023 edition of The Big Night will be held Saturday, Aug. 19, at the Trinchero Napa Valley property. The event is by invitation only, and 150 to 170 people come for the dinner, live auction and gala. Also included are an online auction that is open to the public with 40 to 50 items and a live auction with 15 to 20 lots. The lots include large bottles of wine, for example, or might be a package that includes wine, tours and tastings, and lunch or dinner. The online lots will go live on Friday, Aug. 11.
The evening is held on the Trinchero property because the Trincheros historically have supported the Boys & Girls Clubs. It goes back to the beginning. Vera Trinchero wrote a $10,000 check to help Marianna Hawkins and Father John Brenkle start the club in a small room next to the gym at the St. Helena Catholic School in 1987. At that time Brenkle was rector at the church. In those days the club was holding garage sales to raise money to hire staff. Hawkins served on the first board of directors, left and has now returned, serving on The Big Night Committee. Trinchero’s son, Bob Torres, currently serves on the board and is a past board president.
Some 2022 auction lots
Harlan magnum, sold $2,550
Calistoga Harvest Table for two, sold $1,050
NV Birth Year, wines and burgers with seven friends and Joel Gott, sold $6,150
Mendocino Glamping Getaway, two nights, wine and food credit, sold $935
MacDonald Wines, 1.5 magnum of 2019 Cab and three 750 ml bottles of 2019 Cab, sold $3,450.
The $1 million raised each year is roughly 50% of the $2.1 million annual budget for the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga.
“We spend 85% of our budget directly on programs, which is a high number,” said Nick Haley, the clubs’ director of operations. “We have low overhead for administrative and other costs.”
Unlike other clubs, the fee for a student to belong to the club is $60 for the school year, which covers after-school care held at all five facilities: St. Helena and Calistoga, both for youngsters and separate facilities for teenagers and at Angwin’s Howell Mountain Elementary School. The summer program is also $60 per person. To be eligible for club membership, a child must have completed the first day of kindergarten. On the other end of the spectrum, high school students are also members. Yaconelli estimates that 80% of all schoolchildren between the first grade and 12th grade in the Upper Napa Valley are club members.
“We’re providing one of the lifelines in the valley,” he said.
One of the ways the clubs support the teenagers is to offer three- or four-day trips to colleges in California, heading to UC Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo on one trip and then to USC or UCLA in Los Angeles on another. With, of course, a stop at Disneyland for the kids, Yaconelli said.
Numbers
Haley offered the following:
Number of kids at Calistoga, both registered, daily and summer: 397, 175/day, 110/summer
Calistoga Teen Center, 88 registered, 48/day, 45/summer
In St. Helena, the numbers are: 510 registered, 205/day, 167/summer
SH Teen Center: 101 registered, 49/day, 27/summer
Howell Mountain, 96 registered, 58/day. There is no summer program because the club is based at Howell Mountain Elementary School, which is closed during the summer.
The 2023 summer seven-week program is from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday from June 20 to Aug. 4 at four of the five facilities. Activities include specialty camps, sports, arts, STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, art and math) and others.
Meaning of Big Night
What does The Big Night mean to Haley?
“For me, our community is coming together on one night to celebrate what we do for kids and families in our area,” he said. “A bunch of generous people get in a room and give back just to make sure the kids in our area that need it the most get what they need.”
Through the clubs’ programs and through direct gifts, “When families are in need, when people need us, we jump to it, so that money really is a quick turnaround for the people who need it the most,” he said.
Steve Martin, director of programming and events, also gave his thoughts on The Big Night.
“It is pretty amazing to see the generosity of the people who are on the board and the people of this community,” he said.
These people care about the kids in the community, raise their paddles to fund a specific need and won’t even get anything back, Martin added, but they know what the money is paying for.
“This night is about the kids,” he said, “giving them a future and giving them things to be excited about.”
During the wildfires that have hit the area in the past few years, the clubs pivoted to meet that need, Yaconelli said.
“We quietly go about the business of trying to take care of the community, of families that have lost things during the fires,” he said. “We paid for hotel rooms, we got people cars, we’re always kind of under the radar doing things.”
A big part of that willingness to help comes from the 17-member board of directors, headed by Chris Birdwell and those who provide funds for the clubs.
“They are such an active group of people who are always coming to me and asking, ‘Where’s the need and what more can we do?’” Yaconelli said. “That’s so rare with boards.”
Yaconelli has worked for the local Boys & Girls Clubs since 1997, when he was 27. He had worked at the Petaluma Boys & Girls Club for a couple of years and saw a job listing for club manager when he was visiting his girlfriend in Napa. He said he thought he could do that job, so he applied. When he came in for an interview, St. Helena’s chief of police was there, as were “all of these big people in St. Helena,” he said.
“Midway through the interview they kept asking me questions about budgets and what I’d be doing for fundraising and all of that stuff.”
The job, it turned out, was that of an executive director.
“I didn’t know that or I would have never applied for that job,” he said.
But those interviewing Yaconelli liked him and created a new position. They hired him as club manager so he could work with kids.
“I’ve been here ever since and worked my way up,” he said.
B&G Clubs’ history
Twenty years after its founding on the St. Helena Catholic Church property in 1987, a new St. Helena facility opened in January 2008. Cost was $6 to $7 million and it was built in partnership with the St. Helena Unified School District, which provided the land. In exchange, they use the club’s gym for physical education and other classes during the day.
The St. Helena teen center is being operated in two empty classrooms on the elementary school campus, but Yaconelli said the board intends to get the teens their own space, working with both the school district and the city.
“In the next three years we’re going to work on finding space for our teens,” he said.
The Calistoga clubhouse was built in 2017, and the building was dedicated the day before the Tubbs Fire hit. The raging wildfire went from Calistoga to Santa Rosa before it was stopped.
“We thought it was going to burn down right after we opened it,” Yaconelli said.
Ironically, instead of the clubhouse burning down, the Tubbs Fire burned Yaconelli’s house in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park.
The Calistoga clubhouse was built on land donated by the City of Calistoga, which uses the clubhouse for city events. Yaconelli said it is a de facto community center, with groups such as the Soroptimists able to use it for little or no cost for their fundraising events.
The Calistoga Teen Center is on Grant Street, across a baseball field from the high school and next to the tennis courts, so it is popular. The club has been running it for about a dozen years.
In St. Helena, the teen center has been in two elementary school classrooms since the city closed its teen center in 2018.
The Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga added Howell Mountain Elementary School in Angwin in about 2018 and use one of their classrooms and the outdoor space for their club members.
Yaconelli said the Upper Valley is a special community.
There’s a lot of wealth here and there’s a lot of generosity,” he said, especially once you go out and talk to people and they understand the mission of the club. “Sometimes we’re the best-kept secret, although we try to get our name out there as much as possible.”
With teen mental health, college tours, gratitude training for youngsters, summer activities and after-school care for the vast majority of students in the area, the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga are helping Upper Valley families and their children. The Big Night event funds all of those activities.
Dave Stoneberg is a journalist who was a reporter and editor at the St. Helena Star from 2006 to 2020.