Pace finds her calling at Boys and Girls Club

By Matthew Jackson
Staff Reporter

June 13, 2009 07:54 pm

— One day, several years ago, Jackie Pace set a goal for herself.
“I just sat down on my bed one day and said: ‘Lord, what is it that you would have me do?’ And he said: ‘work with children,’” Pace said. “So that’s what I’m doing.”
For the past five years Pace has been an integral part of the Boys and Girls Club of Walker County, serving first as the site director for the club’s location at Scott Johnson Elementary School, and then as the operations director, a position she has held since July of last year.
A native of Jackson, Miss., Pace came to Texas in the 1980s, transferring from a retail management position in Mississippi to one in Houston. There, she married Huntsville native Curvey Harrison, and the couple relocated to Huntsville in 1989.
Here, Pace began working with local nonprofits, serving as a volunteer at the COME Center in Huntsville.
When her husband passed away in 1995, Pace found herself a single mother with three children. She took a job at Scott Johnson Elementary, and would remain with the school district for 12 years. To earn extra cash, she joined the Boys and Girls Club as site director at Scott Johnson.
“I just saw the need. They needed the help,” Pace said. “I knew the families and I knew the kids, so it was a no-brainer. I knew the program, liked what I saw, and needed the extra cash. Plus I enjoyed what I did and I really loved what the program had to offer kids.”
From the very beginning, Pace was interested in taking her work with the Boys and Girls Club to the next level.
“I always told Michelle (Michelle McKenzie, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club): ‘If you ever have a full-time position, keep me in mind,’” Pace said. “When the opportunity arose, she remembered. She said she always knew that it would be me.”
For nearly a year, Pace has served as the club’s operations director, overseeing a staff of 30, and supervising and implementing the club’s numerous programs for area youth.
During Pace’s time as operations director, several new programs have been added, and Pace plans for more in the future as the club continues to grow.
“We have implemented programs like ‘Kids In Control,’ ‘Healthy Habits,’ ‘Stay Smart,’ and ‘Smart Leaders’ to help our kids be more successful,” Pace said. “All of our programs give kids a sense of belonging, a sense of usefulness, and a sense of competency. The Boys and Girls Club has a large variety of programs available for us. The programs were there (before I came), but Michelle couldn’t do it all by herself, so I just implemented. And there are so many other programs that I’d like to implement as we grow.”
And growing has become a concern for the club in Walker County. With more than 300 kids at their two sites in Huntsville, and a waiting list filled with families waiting to join, the club is looking to expand their facilities.
“We are just busting at the seams,” Pace said. “We have a long waiting list of kids waiting to get in, and our goal is to build a state of the art facility on MLK in the near future. Land has been donated, and now we just need to raise the funds. We’re hoping to have a gym, a skate park, two playgrounds, an art room, a computer lab, and hopefully even a teen center. That’s something we really need. We need a place for our kids to go.”
Though running the daily operations of the Boys and Girls Club is a full-time job, it’s not enough for Pace. She also serves as youth director at Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church, as a member of the Huntsville’s Promise Faith In Action Committee, and as the vice presidents of Community Praise Ministry, an organization she helped found which partners local churches to give free school supplies to children in need.
“I started doing that in the park years ago, and a youth director from another church asked me if they could pitch in,” Pace said. “Eventually, we just got all the churches involved.”
Last year, Community Praise Ministry distributed 400 school supply packages to local children, and Pace said the group hopes to raise that number again this year.
Though she acknowledges that such a heavy workload is sometimes completely overwhelming, Pace finds comfort and inspiration in the simple rewards of helping others.
“Being able to help others is why I do this,” she said. “Martin Luther King said: ‘Be great in serving others,’ and I guess somewhere it was just instilled in me to help others. That’s the kind of family that I came from in Mississippi, the kind that was always there to help others. Service just runs through my veins.”