With nearly 4,000 local affiliates as it celebrates its centennial, Boys and Girls Clubs of America still is learning how to keep everyone funded, happy and on the same page.

By Nicole Rollender

“We’ve been opening a new club almost every day for the last four years. This ‘club explosion’ was a very conscious thing,” Aschermann says. “Our system worked. We just asked ourselves, ‘How many kids can we serve?’ The only way to do that is continuing to open new clubs.”

It took 92 years for BGCA to hit 2,000 clubs, and now, in just seven years, that number’s nearly doubled to 3,700. For the past four years, BGCA indeed has launched at least one new club every single day — 389 in 2005 alone.