Ron Johnson reflects on growing into a career at the Boys & Girls Clubs, and raising his own family in it.

AFTER HE RETIRED FROM THE NFL IN 1989, former Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Ron Johnson moved back to the place he grew up, Monterey County. He initially tried his hand as a stockbroker at a Carmel-based financial firm, but something about the career path just didn’t feel right. A few years into the job, he was having lunch with one of his coworkers, who could tell that Johnson wasn’t as passionate about the work as he could be.

“He was talking about bond trading and he was so excited about being in that line of work, and I just was not tracking with him,” Johnson says. “He could see that I didn’t have the enthusiasm that he had and he said, ‘If you could have any job, what would you want to do?’”

Johnson told his colleague that he really enjoyed working with young people because of their energy. He always felt he could relate to them, and had a lot to pass on to younger people, not only in the realm of football.

“He said, ‘It just so happens I know the chairman of the Boys & Girls Club and they’re going through a leadership change and I could introduce you to my friend,’” Johnson recalls. “I took the meeting.”

At that time, in 1992, the nonprofit was in the early stages of building what is now the Seaside clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monterey County on LaSalle Avenue.

“They showed me the vision and I was really excited about it,” Johnson says. “Within several months, I jumped from the broker business into the Boys & Girls Club as a program director and never looked back.”

When Johnson started with the nonprofit, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monterey County was based in an older church building. Johnson remembers about 75 kids coming in each day after school, who, he said with some hesitation, “could use some coaching.”

Johnson then recruited his friends from the NFL, M.L. Carter and Anthoney Toney, to lend a hand at the club alongside Donna Ferraro, the now-retired president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monterey County. Johnson says that the fundraising effort of former NFL player and coach Herm Edwards was also pivotal in getting the Seaside Boys & Girls Club headquarters off the ground.

“We were a small but mighty club in those days, and we did a lot of great work,” Johnson says.

During that era, Johnson recalls, former Monterey Superior Court Judge Mike Fields, who oversaw juvenile cases, paid him one of the biggest compliments Johnson ever received.

“He said that, at one time, he would see eight to 10 kids a day from our neighborhood, but after the work you guys are doing at the Boys & Girls Club, and with the impact that you’re making, I’m not seeing that anymore,” Johnson says. “That was a testament to how important the Boys & Girls Club is and how it can transform communities.”

Today, Johnson serves as the CEO and president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Monterey County, which serves hundreds of Monterey County kids at its Seaside and Salinas clubs.

Weekly: How have you seen the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monterey County evolve since you started working there?

Johnson: We are more focused on academics, leadership and building good character. Those are our pillars and what we call priority outcomes. Back in the early days, and before me also, Boys & Girls Clubs would always have a gym and a game room with a pool table and ping-pong and those kinds of things. The focus then was keeping kids out of trouble, off the streets and having them around responsible adults.

The clubs have evolved to focus on developing leadership and setting kids up for success with their career goals after they grow out of the Boys & Girls Club, and creating these pathways for them – whether they want to go to college, be an electrician or join the military. There was no formal program that we had like that when I started back in the ’90s.

As the Clubs evolved over the years, how have you evolved along with them?

I have evolved from being on the floor as a program director, where I was directly working with the kids, to the point when I knew every kid in the building. Now, as a CEO, I am more removed from that. I am kind of a quiet person, so this has pushed me to stand up on the stage and be a leader, and try to scale this out and get to the point where we can motivate our communities and everyone to have Boys & Girls Clubs in every community, or at least to use our services.

Who are some of the young people from the Boys & Girls Clubs who stick out in your mind from over the years?

We just had this one young lady, her name is Nianti. She competed for “Youth of the Year,” which is a national Boys & Girls Club program. If you win the national award you receive a $50,000 scholarship and also Toyota donates a car, so the winner drives home in probably a $40,000 car. We have more than 4 million kids that go to Boys & Girls Clubs every year, and many of them compete for this Youth of the Year title. It starts at the local clubs and goes on to state then regional then national. She made it to the national competition, which is only six other teens.

To get to that level, you have to have a great GPA, write essays, you need people to write letters of recommendation for you and then you’ve got to give scores of speeches and handle yourself around these highly influential people.

Nianti is our first member who made it all the way to the national competition in New York. That’s just one over my career at the Boys & Girls Club, we’ve had thousands of success stories.

There is another young man who I have been thinking about a lot, Anthony Wills. He is a pediatrician now for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento. This kid was really quiet in his early teens when he was attending the club. He was smart, gifted and talented in music and in science. He earned a scholarship to Stanford. He’s doing great now and is a highly regarded pediatrician. I thought of him because Nianti has pursuits of wanting to be a pediatrician herself, so I was thinking about connecting them.

What are some of the biggest challenges for the Boys & Girls Clubs currently?

Keeping pace with the need. We’ve got the two clubs, in Seaside and Salinas, that are good-sized clubs. We can handle 250-300 kids in our Seaside Club and up to 450-500 in Salinas, and that’s pretty good capacity, but there’s a tremendous need in South County.

There are services that we can offer that can help get more kids on lucrative career paths but right now we’re not built to help down there in a way that we are in Salinas and Seaside.

We’re doing some things in Gonzales where we work through this teen innovation center with the City of Gonzales, and they’re allowing us to use a brand-new building to operate our program. And they have other nonprofit organizations that provide other services one day a week.

That’s a start, but then we still have Soledad and King City and Greenfield, and all of those areas could use our services. The big challenge is figuring out how to be of service there and get it supported. All of these dreams cost money. We are always making sure we have the funding to keep it going. It’s an easy sell for me, because I see what Boys & Girls Clubs do for kids, in terms of their confidence and their opportunities.

What do you find to be the most rewarding aspects of your job?

Just seeing the kids get it and get to the point where they are able to help other people the way that somebody helped them. Both of my sons attended the club and now they are both at Brigham Young [University] and both are in the football program. My older son is a coach and my younger son is on the team as a defensive back.

It circles back to the Boys & Girls Club because M.L. and Anthony poured into them, and Donna Ferraro used to change their diapers, so the culture they were in all of this time shaped the way they carry themselves. My wife and I were just in Provo for BYU’s game against Notre Dame, and the coaches, school officials and everyone we ran into told us how we did a great job raising them – and that they care so much about other people and are just first-class people.

I give a lot of that credit to my late mother and a ton of it to the Boys & Girls Club. Those are my kids but I really feel the same way about so many other kids who are now grown up and their kids are attending the club. It’s a full-circle gift that keeps on giving.

What projects, now or in the future, are you particularly excited for?

I’m always excited for the holidays. We have the Adopt-A-Family program, where we identify 400 kids, and this year we are going to do a high-need category for families that have hardships paying their bills and getting food on the table. We get the Christmas wish lists for the kids and community members can sponsor them, typically about $300 per kid. We get them shoes, winter coats and clothing, and their dream toy or item that they wanted for Christmas. We also make sure about 3,000 kids that aren’t as high-needs have gifts to open during Christmas time.

I’m also excited for our Golf For Kids tournament at Monterey Peninsula Country Club, which happens on Feb. 1, the Monday of the AT&T [Pro-Am]. It’s a great tournament and it raises some pretty good dollars for us.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the Boys & Girls Clubs to the community as we get closer to holidays?

Just a word of gratitude. Many people give year after year and you hear that overused cliche about it making a difference and all that, but it really does.