How Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro South Made Teen Hunger a National Conversation

A U.S. congressman gets one minute on the House floor. There are a thousand things he could spend it on. On February 20, Rep. Jim McGovern spent his on a Boys & Girls Club in Brockton, Massachusetts.

“Teen hunger is an often overlooked problem,” he told his colleagues, “and this Congress must be doing more to help teens access the nutritious food that they need to succeed. And that starts by talking directly with them.”

Then he told them where he’d just been.

McGovern brought his colleague Rep. Jake Auchincloss along for the visit, the sixth stop on McGovern’s statewide End Hunger Now Tour. Together they toured the work CEO Derek Heim and his team have built into how Boys & Girls Club of Metro South serves more than 2,500 young people a year across Brockton, Taunton, Camp Riverside, and several extension sites.

What they walked through is best understood as a single integrated system. The Kids Café meals program serves roughly 400 members daily and more than 100,000 meals a year. The Blue Spoon Community Kitchen is the working kitchen behind those meals, also preparing food for families across the region. And the three Freight Farms Greenery hydroponic container farms - at Camp Riverside since 2021, at the Brockton Clubhouse since 2022, and at the Taunton Clubhouse since 2024 - supply the produce that goes into the kitchen and out to the community. Each Greenery grows up to 13,000 plants at a time, year-round, in a 40-foot insulated shipping container.  

Derek had wanted a Freight Farm at the Club for five years before COVID-era food security funding made the first one possible. Today they have three. They didn’t add a meals program; they built a food system.

But the part of the visit that made it into the floor speech - the part McGovern called the highlight - was the time the congressmen spent with the Teen Ambassadors. Young people from BGCMS who told two members of the U.S. Congress, in their own words, why a place like this matters to their health and their future.

Go back to McGovern’s framing: that starts by talking directly with them. The Teen Ambassadors weren’t a feature of the visit. They were the entire point of the visit. The teens themselves were the policy argument.

That’s the part of this story that’s one of the most important to study. Across the 300+ BGCs we work with, the Clubs that produce that kind of youth voice – the kind that lands in front of cameras unrehearsed and credible – share something in common. It’s a leadership decision, made over years, to put teens in rooms where decisions are made and to keep them there long enough to develop a point of view.

Derek and his team made that decision. They kept making it. And when two members of Congress walked through the door, the teens were ready, because they’d been ready the whole time.

That’s the part of the BGCMS story worth lifting up to the broader Boys & Girls Club movement. Not the floor speech. The conditions that made the floor speech possible.

McGovern closed his remarks by urging every member of Congress to visit a youth-serving organization in their own district during the upcoming recess. Sit down with young leaders. Listen.

The Boys & Girls Club movement gets to listen too — to its own. The Clubs working on teen hunger, on youth voice, on the daily decisions that build a culture like the one in Brockton are doing work the rest of the movement can learn from. The challenge for the rest of us is to find them, study what they’re doing, and amplify it.

Congratulations to Derek Heim, the BGCMS team, and the Teen Ambassadors who set the standard.

Read more stories from the Boys & Girls Club movement on the Daxko blog.

Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro South is a Daxko partner organization. Spotlight published with permission.