Rich Baldwin grew up attending the Boys Club in North Little Rock, Ark., during the 1950s and 1960s, learning to swim and playing basketball, pingpong, boxing – everything, he said.
“I just lived there,” said Baldwin, who joined the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City staff six months ago as the teen program and outreach specialist in Independence. “I can’t even fully measure how it impacted me and influenced my formative years. The mentors and leaders there – I still remember them. They’ve passed on, and I can’t pay them back, so I’m paying it forward.”
Baldwin, along with fellow Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City staff members, joined more than 120 residents and the Missouri Mavericks hockey team for the inaugural Dinner on Ice event Wednesday night at the Independence Events Center.
With the Mavericks players serving guests their meals, all proceeds and tips were donated directly to the metropolitan area’s five Boys & Girls Clubs, including the two locations in Eastern Jackson County. Several children who attend the clubs also got to play broom hockey – on ice – with the Mavericks’ mascot, Mac.
At least 80 percent of the about 2,000 children served at Independence’s two Boys & Girls Clubs belong to single- or no-parent families, Baldwin said. Events like Wednesday’s help to recognize the children on the greater Kansas City “community stage,” he said.
“Things like that are Kodak moments,” Baldwin said of the children playing broom hockey. “For the Mavericks to have adopted us, it is literally priceless.”
Mavericks players Carlyle Lewis and Simon Watson added waiting tables to their ever-growing résumés that also include runway modeling during October’s ICE fashion show that benefited – who else? – the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Kansas City.
“We’re just trying to raise some money to hopefully make a brighter Christmas for some of these kids,” Lewis said. “It’s a tough economy right now, and anything we can do to brighter their holidays will be good for us and everyone involved.”
