Meet Jamie Johnson | Executive Director & Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jamie Johnson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jamie, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
My wife, Kathy, and I were both rescued out of difficult situations as young people and saw first-hand how badly young people are being hurt. We witnessed in our own lives that young people, as it is with all people, hurt others when they have been hurt. So we were watching a horrific cycle unfold where the people damaging young people (drug dealers, gang leaders, pedophiles, absent parents, online predators, promiscuous 14 year olds) were present on every block of neighborhoods across the city 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Meanwhile the “good guys” were mostly absent, meeting and arguing for six hours, Saturdays a year of whether to buy a popcorn machine for a local youth center. The result of this in many cities was that young people were being hurt and turning to damage their cities. As a result, youth were becoming cities’ biggest problems. Our big idea was to turn vulnerable youth populations from a city’s problem into the solution. While disconnected, disengaged youth damage a city’s future, we have found a way to turn these young people into the heroes their city needs. With this in mind, we founded Boy With a Ball as a non-profit organization in San Antonio, Texas in 2001 to fill a void in local youth programs, in the pursuit of developing scalable solutions. At that time, most programs for youth focused on either attracting youth to a site or provided only a few hours of mentoring a month, diminishing their impact and funneling their dollars into a dead-end.

However, BWAB’s innovative team-based approach trained and released large numbers of motivated volunteers into some of our city’s toughest neighborhoods. The power of presence, long-haul commitment and our willingness to learn from those we seek to serve has borne lasting fruit.
In 2013, we moved our global offices to Atlanta. This grassroots method has now been successfully replicated across the U.S. including here in Atlanta, in Latin America and in Africa. Entire slums are becoming centers of change and development. Young people who used to be seen as victims have become leaders. We have grown our work to nine cities in five countries across the world and are continuing to grow.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
In 2006, Boy With a Ball launched Love Your City, mobilizing young people from local high schools & universities to be trained and led in small teams out into the winding pathways within a 3,000 person slum in Costa Rica called “El Triangulo.” Each week, scores of young volunteers separated into 3-5 person teams and went door to door building relationships with each resident.

Within months, community needs and opportunities (talented, under resourced students, teenage mothers, illiteracy issues, school dropout rates) were identified and mentoring relationships and small groups or interventions were launched to address them: Tutoring centers were started. School supply drives. English as a Second Language classes. Computer classes. Job skills training. Women’s groups. Scholarship groups. The idea was to use the resources of volunteers and community members to entrepreneurially create mentoring relationships and programs that were responsive to the developmental needs of the community.

As a result, within just three years:
the level of education rose from a 3rd grade to 6th grade level,
40% of the community rose out of poverty and life in the slum and
gangs were eliminated.
A decade later, the entire initial slum was razed because, in a community where no one had ever graduated from high school in 2006, now everyone graduated and rose out of poverty to live in middle class neighborhoods.

Corporations like Western Union, Intel and HP were key partners, providing CSR volunteers, scholarships funds and today these companies now have dozens of young executives who rose out of the Love Your City. Funding was provided later by the U.S. State Department and we were able to present Love Your City at the World Bank’s Annual Meetings in 2016.

We have now expanded Love Your City to Managua, Nicaragua, three U.S. cities (Atlanta, Boston and San Antonio), to Nairobi, Kenya and to Enugu, Nigeria. We have developed a phone based application called The#MVMT Platform that will help us scale Love Your City to additional major cities across the world, providing training, tools, data collection and assessments to help new teams grow. Building out this exponential technology from pilot to what it will need to be will require strong, visionary funders to lend their unique skills and talents to this world changing fight.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Gwinnett County is the center to our world. Where the population was once 70k white people, this county is now 900k people from all over the world, speaking more than 100 languages. We know that by 2040, the county will add 400k more residents. While this diversity creates a richness of cultures, perspectives, personalities and promise, Gwinnett is facing a herculean task in learning to fight for the young people within Gwinnett County Public Schools who go home each night to so many different cultures and languages. If we can learn to build the bridges these communities need, we will have created a roadmap for the rest of the U.S. We love Norcross, particularly within the Gateway 85 CID. We are addicted to Mexican food and Norcross is a great place to find authentic restaurants, from breakfast tacos to burritos, tamales and enchiladas.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Covenant Life Church located at 1945 Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road, Lawrenceville, GA 30043 was the safe place that help put me and my wife Kathy back together after our first year of marriage had exploded due to our own high-risk pasts. In 2013, we returned to the church to team with Pastor Chris Hyatt in helping this innovative, authentic group grow into impacting their community. This is a wonderful, life-giving, accepting group of people who know what it is to love people in a way that powerfully transforms their lives.

Website: www.boywithaball.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boywithaball/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boy-with-a-ball/mycompany/?viewAsMember=true

Twitter: https://twitter.com/boywithaball?lang=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boywithaball

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0v-g3USyvfiR8oxH_KuKbg