Catalyze 2024: Freddy Williams

We’re asking thought leaders, business people and creatives to talk about the upcoming year and give us catalyzing ideas for making St. Pete a better place to live. What should our city look like? What are their hopes, their plans, their problem-solving ideas? This is Catalyze 2024.

2023 has been a busy year for Freddy Williams, who took over as President and Chief Executive Officer of both Boys & Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay and Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast under a shared services agreement. The new partnership was announced Nov. 1, and since then, Williams said he’s received significant community support.

“My biggest takeaway is seeing the power that can truly be realized through collaboration,” said Williams. “We’re seeing some incredible opportunities by having both organizations talking openly about different programming and where they complement each other.”

Boys & Girls Clubs is a national nonprofit that provides programs and services to help positively shape children through after-school and in-school programming focused on health, safety, mentorship and empowerment. Williams said while Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast and Tampa Bay are both in the Top 50 of all Boys & Girls Clubs nationally, it no longer made sense for the organizations to operate individually.

“What we realized is that we were having a very difficult time in each one of the organizations truly moving the needle,” Williams said. “We’re doing great work helping kids in our respective communities, but we needed to look at more transformation. By bringing both organizations together under one leader and focusing on a regional approach, we’re in a better position to support kids.”

Williams said bringing the organizations together has increased their capacity to collaborate with different businesses on workforce development, giving kids access to paid internships and work opportunities throughout the broader region with companies with a regional approach to hiring. In October, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast merged with Earn to Learn FL, a Fort-Myers-based education program that combines personal finance training with scholarship opportunities. It also expanded its partnership with TD Synnex, where students earn $15 an hour, a college scholarship and a job after high school. 

“Being able to use technology and taking a national perspective will allow us to be able to go faster in 2024, particularly as it relates to job and life skills for for teens and young adults,” Williams said. “We also entered into a new partnership with the Pinellas County schools where we’ve opened up a Boys & Girls Club program in every middle school in Pinellas County focused on opioid prevention. We’re looking forward to continuing to stand up this new operating model of the way we’re serving young people into 2024.”

Williams also serves as the national chairman of the board of directors for Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s Professional Association. Through his work on the board, Williams has had a hand in developing a new strategic plan for Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which serves more than three million young people at over 5,000 locations across the country each year. Williams said the organization’s new “National Youth Outcomes Initiative,” to be announced in May, will be the largest private data set of teens and tweens with over 100,000 respondents, examining the insights and attitudes of existing Boys and Girls Club members.

“The importance of that was, rather than having a bunch of adults that are sitting around the room and trying to understand what things mean, we now have these massive datasets of understanding that [which] will help us develop ways to engage teens,” Williams said. “We then want to examine how to go to scale and what was reasonable, rather than just picking a number and saying, ‘Oh, we want to go from [serving] three and a half million kids to 10 million kids.’ We started looking at the addressable market share of young people across the country. We want to understand kids who have no safe place to go after school, why they don’t go to the place after school and where Boys & Girls Clubs can not only address that, but also help provide systems approaches and system leadership to raise the quality of all out-of-school-time providers.”

As our regional Boys & Girls Clubs work to recalibrate and expand programs, Williams said having measured and targeted growth nationally will help him and his staff to deploy a data-driven, mission-centric strategic initiative locally in 2024.

“Having this national perspective is going to serve our local market very well because we’ve been doing some things locally to get ahead, so we can really lead the nation in a lot of different regards. I also think there’s this recognition in our community of the critical importance of collaboration and partnership. I’m seeing more partnership discussions, going beyond just transactional, and really looking at transformational partnerships. There is a lot of great momentum. Leaders have done tremendous work over the previous years in the way our community responded to the pandemic, becoming stronger and forging relationships in more meaningful ways. We’re really primed for greatness as a community in 2024.”