A Kensington boxing club and the young people it helps beat the odds

What happened

The Philadelphia Tribune has published a local news report on a boxing club in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, under the headline “Inside Kensington: How a boxing club helps young people fight and beat the odds.” As the Tribune frames it, the gym’s work is with young people, and the aim is to help them get past the odds stacked against them.

We could not open the full Tribune story before this brief went out. So this brief does not name the coaches. It also leaves out the club’s history and any figures on how many young people it serves. Those details belong to the Philadelphia Tribune’s reporters, and you can read them in the original report.

Our reflection

“Beat the odds” is the Tribune’s phrase, and it is honest. It is also a cold phrase when you sit with it. Odds mean somebody already ran the numbers on a young person before they ever learned his name. Plenty of young people in Philadelphia grow up knowing the math has been done on them. Some decide to live down to it, because at least that way nobody can surprise them.

A boxing club lives or dies on whether somebody shows up with a key and opens the place before the kids get there. Anyone who has kept a youth space open knows what that costs. It costs evenings that belonged to your own family, and often money out of your own pocket for gloves and wraps. The heaviest cost never makes it into a grant report: a kid who was there every night for a month stops coming, and you do not know why.

In John 6 Andrew finds a boy with five barley loaves and two fish, and he says what all of us say when we look at a need that big: what are they for so many? Jesus does not scold the boy for bringing too little. He has the crowd sit down, gives thanks for exactly what is in his hands, and feeds them. Mark tells us he sat across from the temple treasury and watched a widow put in two small coins, and he called his disciples over to see her. Heaven keeps its eye on gifts like that. A coach wrapping a teenager’s hands at six in the evening is that kind of gift.

Paul used the ring too: “I do not box as one beating the air.” Discipline with a target. A heavy bag teaches the body what the Spirit is working on in the heart. Anger can be aimed. Fear can be trained. Self control is listed with love and joy as fruit of the Spirit, and it grows the same slow way a jab does, through repetition, with somebody watching who will correct you without giving up on you.

Now the part that is ours. Some of us have looked at a young man on a corner and done the same math the odds-makers do. We decided he was a risk before we decided he was a neighbor. That is sin, and I have to confess it as much as anybody. The Samaritan’s virtue was mostly that he stopped. The religious men had their reasons for walking on. We have ours.

Change in a neighborhood rarely comes in a press release. It looks like an adult who shows up on the same nights every week until a young person believes he will. That is the heart of our JCVI work: reaching young people at first contact, before a record exists, and staying with them. Neighborhood gyms and church basements do that work every day, often on almost nothing.

So find the open door closest to you. Ask the people running it what they need this month, and then give it. Maybe that is your Tuesday nights. Maybe it is a check. The steps below are a place to start.

There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?

John 6:9

Source: The Philadelphia Tribune, “Inside Kensington: How a boxing club helps young people fight and beat the odds | Local News | phillytrib.com”