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Mostly Cloudy Keystone Club of Locust Valley teens to provide love, service without borders
Many young people today are told about the importance of service to others, but few go above and beyond to actually help their fellow human beings. Members of the Grenville Baker Boys & Girls Club’s Keystone Club are among those relative few, and are currently raising money to work with refugees in Greece next April.
This will not be Grenville Baker’s first service trip. Stephanie Urio, the Locust Valley club’s senior director of teen programs, said that she first organized a trip in the summer of 2015, taking a group of students to Puerto Rico to help build a five-family apartment complex.
In 2017, Urio took another group of teenagers to Panama, where they lived with an indigenous community and helped build a house for the local school’s teacher and a new library for the village. The Keystone Club provides leadership development opportunities for young people between ages 14 and 18.
Urio explained that she planned the trips every few years so different generations of the club get the chance to go on them, and so members have time to raise money for them. The pandemic has prevented the trips in recent years, but as it wound down, Urio said, it felt like the time was right to restart the program.
In April, the Keystone Club will partner with Love Without Borders, an international charity that provides education, nutrition, medical and foster care programs for refugees around the world. Club members heard about the group by way of their ongoing partnership with the New York Institute of Technology, one of several organizations which the club works with. Earlier this year, several students at the college, who had gotten involved in Love Without Borders, held an art show at Grenville Baker.
“They needed a place to have an art show to sell the stuff (art) as a fundraiser, so that day we were talking to the NYIT students, (and) we were talking to the people from Love Without Borders,” Urio recalled. “We already had in our mind that we wanted to do these kinds of international trips again, and I just thought it all just kind of came together and made sense.”
Ten members of the Keystone Club, who had to pass a written exam and an interview with Urio, will travel to Athens next spring to teach English and art therapy to refugee children from across the Middle East and North Africa. Urio said she has always had the admissions-like requirements, because it is important that the teens understand that a service trip isn’t a vacation.
Sandra Galdamez, the club’s 15-year-old treasurer, said that for her essay, she wrote about her passion to help others, and how she looked forward to having the chance to work with teenagers from around the world.
“I want to just be a help for other people, and be able to be someone that other people can rely on and look for,” Galdamez said. “I just really want to provide something for other people in any way that I can help.”
Club president Abraham Diaz Gomez, 16, explained that he felt the call to serve because, like many fellow members, he is a first-generation American. His family emigrated from the Dominican Republic, and he can relate to the experience of being in a new place far from home.
“I feel like being able to help people with the process of, like, being in an area that they’re not used to is very important,” Diaz Gomez said, “because it shapes who they’ll be and how they’re going to act for the rest of their lives. I understand their experience, and I feel like that translates a little bit to what’s going on and how I can help.”
To pay for the trip, the group has held numerous fundraisers, from a dodgeball tournament to cooking for members of the community. Club members have raised roughly $12,000 of the anticipated $25,000 cost.
On Nov. 3, they will hold another fundraiser at The View Grille, where they will make gyros and Greek salads and hold a raffle. Anyone interested in helping the club meet its goal, or in learning more about the work of the Boys & Girls Club can visit GBBGC.org.
