www.montereycountynow.com NOVEMBER 12-18, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 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. Johnson has watched over the years as the nonprofit evolved from simply providing a space for young people to go after school to keep them out of trouble into an organization that actively helps them succeed in their studies and beyond. While working as a stockbroker after his 1989 retirement from the NFL, Johnson felt like something was missing from his life and later found his calling, helping young people through the nonprofit. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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