Choate accepts position with Boys & Girls Club

It didn’t take Mike Choate long to get back into an advocacy position for children in Fallbrook. The recently retired superintendent of the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District took a short vacation then jumped back into the fray as the part-time executive director of the Boys & Girls Club Foundation.

“I’ve committed to 20 hours a month,” he says, but he admits the job might grow as his task list lengthens and he becomes immersed in its responsibilities.

In his new role, Choate’s challenge is to create awareness of the club’s future financial needs by encouraging gift-giving through estate endowments and other means of funding.

“The foundation’s goal is not to compete for donations for operations,” Choate says, although the club does actively pursue that objective in various ways.

The Boys & Girls Club of North County is a member of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, a national nonprofit youth organization founded in 1860 that links individual clubs throughout the US. Their goal is to provide after-school activities involving health and fitness for children between the ages of 6 and 18. Once called the Boys Club of America, the organization changed its name in 1990 to admit girls and now serves the needs of more than 4.6 million children throughout the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There are 3,900 autonomous local clubs.

The Boys & Girls Club has supported the needs of children in Fallbrook since 1962, first as the Boys Club of Fallbrook, then in 1998 as the Boys & Girls Clubs of North County in response to growth in the greater Fallbrook area. It now encompasses seven locations, including one on the Pala Indian reservation, and includes after-school programs that are partially supported by state and federal funding. At present there are 2,800 member children who are primarily cared for between the hours of 2 and 6 p.m. daily when their parents are not at home.

Choate is excited about the endowment possibilities of the foundation and what it means to the future of Boys & Girls Club members in Fallbrook. There may be tax incentives, he says, then lists proceeds from life insurance policies, donations of land and portions of estate assets among other types of endowments that people can choose to benefit the organization.

By January he will have prepared a plan for presentation to the foundation’s board of directors to encourage gift-giving, then as the plan rolls out, Choate will embark on a round of fundraising presentations to local residents and organizations.