By Robert Perea
On the wall near his desk in the new Boys & Girls Clubhouse at the Community Response and Resource Center, Oscar Aguilar has hung several framed certificates and plaques.
The one on top is the certificate presented to him for being the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows 2007 Member of the Year for the Larry D. Johnson Teen Center. That plaque helps Aguilar stay focused on his mission as the Area Director for the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows Serving Fernley, which opened in its new location at the CRRC last week.
“I hang that plaque higher than all of my other recognitions because it’s just a reminder of my purpose and of what I received that should be given back to communities,” Aguilar said.
As the Area Director, Aguilar oversees the programs that serve about 1,600 total youths ranging from ages 6-18. As much as the Boys & Girls Club has offered through the years at its various sites in Fernley schools, Aguilar said the new location will allow them to expand some programs and add new ones.
“With the commercial kitchen there’s opportunities to expand our cooking club, having a little bit more space to teach culinary skills,” he said. “It also gives the opportunity to work with our workforce development programs.”
The Boys & Girls Club has a food trailer they’ve used for Food Truck Fridays in Reno, which this year finished in the top eight in the Northern Nevada Food Truck Showdown.
“They’ve been voted one of the best food trucks, and those kids are slinging out pizzas,” Aguilar said. “We get them trained up on their food handler’s card, so there’s opportunities like that to excel.”
Aguilar’s passion for serving kids comes from his own experiences as a teen member of the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows. He first joined the club in 2006 at the Larry D. Johnson Community Center after moving from Carson City to Sparks to live full-time with his mom full-time just before his freshman year at Sparks High School.
“And then I met Charles Walker, who was my first coordinator, my first kind of a mentor outside of a parent, and ever since then, got me involved with leadership roles,” Aguilar said. “I would say that’s what kickstarted my leadership within the community and doing community outreach.”
Aguilar admits that his 14-year-old self never envisioned the impact the Club would have on him or the direction it would lead him.
“If you asked me back then, I wouldn’t see myself here,” he said. “But now that I’m living here, I would say a lot mentors, a lot of key moments helping others, that shaped me into the role model that I see myself as now.”
Aguilar took over as Area Director after the Covid-19 pandemic, and one of the first things he did was get his staff together to come up with more ways to serve kids.
“Our motto is ‘Doing whatever it takes,’ so I took that motto because when I came over here, we were a couple of years outside of the pandemic and a lot of kids were still at home,” Aguilar said. “We started brainstorming on what more can we do for our community. What does the community want?”
One of the answers was that they needed more teen services, which led to the opening of the Teen Center next door to McHoppers. From there, they added more athletic programs. In the past year alone, the athletics programs grew by almost 200 kids.
“We’re doing year-round athletics,” Aguilar said. “Indoor, outdoor, soccer, basketball, our Junior Giants program, running sports programs for our 3- to 5-year-olds, our swim camp with the Michael Phelps Foundation. We’re running close to 800 kids in athletics.”
Other kids said they want to learn to build robots, or just a place to trade Pokémon cards.
“Awesome,” Aguilar said. “We got robotics up and running. We got the club running for them to run Pokémon cards.”
With so many of the kids interested in video games, the Club started running e-sports, with internal competition and with other teen centers.
Other programs include tutoring and homework help, art programs, games and computers. Aguilar said they’ve discussed a program with Biggest Little Radio for teens who would like to learn to DJ, and they are starting a journalism club for youth and teen reporters who will be adding a new section to the club newsletter with guidance from The Fernley Reporter.
In all, Aguilar said the club members were excited for their first time walking through the new facility and can’t wait to get started in the club’s new home.
“This is a great opportunity for the community and I’m just happy that I’m a part of it, but I give a lot of kudos to my staff because it’s all because of their hard work that’s leading us to this very exact moment,” Aguilar said.
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