With nearly 4,000 local affiliates as it celebrates its centennial, Boys and Girls Clubs of America still is learning how to keep everyone funded, happy and on the same page.

By Nicole Rollender

Centennial celebration
For its centennial year, BGCA embarked on something it had never done before — a full-scale fundraising campaign. Its three-year “Hope and Opportunity Campaign,” begun in 2005, aims to raise $200 million, of which it already has garnered $125 million.

“We had a couple of pretty depressing meetings early on with the campaign leadership because they were used to doing campaigns for their colleges and universities where they had donor bases of 150,000,” Aschermann says. “We had to say, ‘We don’t have that kind of list. We have to do this campaign differently.’ We got the board ready, willing and able to do it.”