Ron Ryan Executive director started off his presentation by saying that “you guys (West Side Nut Club) are the best”   In December of 2009 The Boys and Girls Club of Evansville celebrated their 52^nd year of existence.  “For 50 years we warehoused in an 1894 school house”  Ryan went on to talk about how the West Side Nut Club helped with the old gym by repairing the floor and providing new basketball goals.  “Before we tore down the old building, the basketball goals you put up in our old facility are now at Mater Dei.  There were a lot of people who did things at our old building and we didn’t want those things to go down with the ruble so that is why the goals are now at Mater Dei”

Over the years the West Side Nut Club has donated over $75,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Evansville and the Nut Club members hve donated thousands of hours fixing and sprucing up various items at the Boys and Girls Club.

While planning on a new building for the Boys and Girls Club of Evansville Ryan says that they “ran a five million dollar campaign to build this facility and put some in the bank to sustain this facility.  We didn’t go out and hire outside people to tell us how to run our campaign which a lot of organizations do, we just did it!  We went knocking on doors, sitting down with CEO’s of companies.  We did not have to borrow one penny to build our new facility.”

With the expansion of Berry Plastics, The Boys and Girls Club was in a good position to build a new building at new location.  “With Berry and Deaconess and all the building they were doing there were more and more kids that had to rely on being dropped off and for a lot of our kids, they cannot rely on anybody at their house, they rely on our staff.  So we looked at where we needed to go and where were the most kids.  We had three different options and we chose to go across from Lincoln School and we looked at the census and there were 2800 more kids within a mile of our facility than there were at the Illinois St. location”