No decoy, but the real “Miss Kay” Robertson, matriarch of the family featured on A&E’s “Duck Dynasty,” helped lure about 515 people to the eighth annual Steak & Burger Dinner benefiting the Boys & Girls Club of Bulloch County.

Before the crowd, seated restaurant-style in Statesboro First Baptist Church’s massive social hall, Robertson shared her Christian testimony and some rough-and-tumble family history that is not revealed on the popular reality show. But the real star of Saturday’s event was the Boys & Girls Club itself, which provides activities and learning after school and during the summer to more than 400 children and teens.

When expenses are subtracted, the event should net about $65,000 for the club’s programs, said Mike Jones, the club’s executive director.

That will supply more than 10 percent of the current annual budget of about $600,000 and makes this year’s dinner the most successful yet. The Boys & Girls Club budget has declined by more than half from a peak of $1.5 million in 2008.

“We definitely had to reduce the number of kids that we serve and eliminate some of the programs,” Jones said. “But it’s special event fundraisers like this that we’ve really had to increase and try to raise as much money here locally as we can, the way the economy is and the way the federal budgets are, we can’t get dependent on those sorts of revenue streams as much as we were.”

Recession’s aftermath
The dramatic decline in public funding for the nonprofit’s programs tracks closely with the 2008 recession and its aftermath. During the past five years, three federal grants dried up that had supplied a major share of the Boys & Girls

Club’s funding in the areas of physical education, character education and health.

State resources were also slashed. Even grants from family foundations have been reduced. These often relied heavily on interest earnings, Jones said, and interest rates have been near historic lows for several years now.

Although reduced in budget, the Boys & Girls Club of Bulloch County, with its two campuses on Denmark Street, continues to provide activities and mentoring in five core areas. These include education and career development; character and leadership; health and life skills; the arts; and sports, fitness and recreation.

Funding sources such as donations through the Steak & Burger Dinner help the club keep activity fees to a minimum and avoid becoming a “fee-based” program, according to Jones.

“When you’re a fee-based program, you miss a certain demographic, the low-income community, and without a places like the Boys & Girls Club, those kids go home every day after school, and usually their parents are working,” he said.

“So without any adult supervision, they’re left to find recreation and amusement in their own neighborhood.”
Creating an alternative to that situation is the core of the organization’s purpose.

Many adults attending Saturday’s dinner met current Boys & Girls Club members face-to-face. A bus brought the children to the event, and they were stationed, one at each table, among the donors.

Club graduates
Three former members, now grown up, spoke to the crowd.

Kimberly Atkinson, a club member from kindergarten through eighth grade, graduated from Statesboro High School in 2012 and is now attending Georgia Southern University, where she is majoring in child development.

Having graduated from Georgia Southern in May, 2nd Lt. Nathaniel Huff, U.S. Army, is scheduled to go to Fort Benning in December for Advanced Armor School. He appeared in uniform. He attended the Boys & Girls Club from the summer after fifth grade through high school.

“It has had a tremendous impact on me, and that’s another reason why I’m so proud to wear this uniform and to protect this country that gives us these freedoms, the freedom to care for one another, the ability to say, ‘No, I won’t let this person go without food for another night,’” Huff said.

Whitley Stewart, a former Boys & Girls Club Youth of the Year, attended beginning her 10th-grade summer. She graduated from Statesboro High in 2006, then went to Fort Valley State University where she majored in biology. She now has her master’s degree and is pursuing a Ph.D. in entomology at Florida A&M and the University of Florida.

“It was late coming for me, but it was the best couple of years of my life,” Stewart said. “I was able to be the person that I couldn’t really be at school at that time.”

The dinner brought in cash several ways. Individual tickets sold for $100 each, corporate sponsor tables for $750, premium tables for $1,000. Five major sponsors – title sponsor Bi-Lo plus Ogeechee Technical College, Statesboro Cardiology, 40 East Grill and the accounting firm Thigpen, Lanier, Westerfield & Deal – made larger contributions.

Donors enjoyed a meal prepared by five volunteer cooks and brought to the tables by 27 volunteer servers sporting Boys & Girls Club red aprons. People doing other tasks brought the count of volunteers staging the event to about 50.
State Sen. Jack Hill, although a resident of Reidsville in Tattnall County, waited tables as a volunteer. He has done this for several years now and also buys tickets. He attended the first meetings held to organize the Boys & Girls Club of Bulloch County prior to its launch in August 2001.

“As you see people come back and tell your stories, you realize that this is a small investment to make in the success of students,” Hill said. “What we find out is, this is the level that you save kids, not the level that they are in (a Regional Youth Detention Center) or a prison somewhere. It’s also better for the kids and better for America, so anything that I can do to help, I’ll do it in any community that I represent.”