EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE: Hangin’ at the Club

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — The Brigade Boys and Girls Club plays an important part youth development in the Wilmington community. It has for more than 100 years. It gives kids a place to see opportunity. There you’ll find people like Jorge Flores that do an extraordinary job of showing our youth they can do anything they put their mind to.

“Just the other day I was in the homework room and one of the kids was doing a subtraction problem,” Jorge Flores said.

Flores spends a lot of time helping kids during the afternoon programs at the Brigade Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington.

“The week before I had showed him(the student) something, I reminded him of something when he was subtracting,” he said of a recent study session, “and a couple weeks later we were looking at his homework and checking it and I was like, ‘oh you remembered to do that?’ and he was like ‘yeah, because you told me that a couple weeks ago’. So I was like wow, he remembered that because many times kids forget little tiny things and now he always has it perfectly done.”

Flores is a man of many hats at this longtime non-profit in the Port City.

“I do a lot of interpreting for parents,” he said. “Parents come in, I’m the one they speak with because a lot of them either don’t know how to speak English, don’t understand, or they’d feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish.”

Technically, he’s a program aid at the Boys and Girls Club that offers hope and opportunity to countless children. But, truth be known, he’s a lot more to the kids than a job title.
Flores started at the club after high school. It was a part time job he didn’t fully understand.

“As I stayed with it, it really changed me,” he said.

Flores says over time he truly realized what kind of impact he can have on kids who need a little positive direction.

“I think it’s a fact of making kids aware that there’s ways for them as well to be succesfull even if they haven’t met a lot of successful people,” Flores said. “They can come here and meet those people and say “Wow, that can be me!”

And if they are like YOU, Jorge Flores, they’ll turn out ‘Extraordinary’.