Club FBS celebrates its first year

On June 17, 2024 at the University of San Diego, Club FBS (Fitteds, Books & Sneakers) held its Inaugural End of the Year Showcase. It was a gathering of participants in the program, their families and friends as well as supporters of the program at-large.

The Showcase included students from all five schools speaking on their love for the program and what it meant to them. There were poignant moments, laughter, joy and enlightenment as the Young Brothers showed their families and the Club FBS supporters exactly why they are the young men that they are. 

In recapping the year, Founder Ronald Preston Clark laid out what Club FBS has been, is and will be moving forward.

Club FBS was fiscally sponsored by Jelani Matthews and Empowering Mentorships, a relationship that made Club FBS eligible to receive the funding it received. In that light, Club FBs operated under an $80,000 grant from San Diego Foundation and a $3,500 grant from RISE San Diego’s Community Impact Showcase.

We served three middle schools and two high schools from October 2023 to May 2024 including Bell Middle, Mann Middle, Millennial Tech Middle, Lincoln High and Morse High. We ended the year serving 51 students in the program.

Our Club FBS Program GPA was a 3.03 with our middle school at a 2.9 and our high school setting an impeccable standard at a 3.66. All three of our seniors are headed to colleges in the fall and close to half of our students finished the year with a higher or similar grade point average than they started with. 

Our social-emotional learning themes for the year were: Integrity, Empathy, Self-Care, Emotional Health, Toxic Masculinity, Misogyny, Friendship, Purposeful Affection, Global Citizenship, Service and Generational Wealth Building.

Our literary devices for the year were: Connotation, Denotation, Metaphor, Simile, Personification, Oxymoron, Syntax, Diction, Paradox, Euphemism and Colloquialism. 

Our guest speakers for the year were: Joe McClain (3x), Brandon Johnson (2x), Dasean Cunningham, Taryell Simmons and Malik Sampson.

Both programs read four books each. Our middle school program read Forged by Fire by Sharon Draper, Slam by Walter Dean Myers, Letters to a Young Brother by Hill Harper and Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant while our high school program read The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Cry Like A Man by Jason Wilson, Between The World & Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Will To Change by bell hooks.