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

Around this time, BGCA also recruited actor Denzel Washington — a former BGCA kid himself — to be its national spokesperson; 11 years later, Washington’s still active in promoting BGCA.

“I got so tired of our board saying we’re the world’s best-kept secret,” he says. “We came to the conclusion that following a for-profit communications and branding model was the right thing for us to do — figuring out what we wanted to say, who we wanted to say it to and how we wanted to say it. We got pretty ruthless with it, even creating our own unique selling proposition and tailoring all our communications against that USP.”