The 5 Rules That Will Shape our Future

The 5 Rules That Will Shape our Future

Club blooms new life; welcomes former club kids

April 2022 Newe news Feature story by the Eastern Shoshone Tribe

As kids attending the Boys & Girls Club of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, Morning Gambler and Christian Lopez looked up to staff. At the time, staff members Dani White and Mikey Chingman made an impact on them and eventually in their adult lives. For an 11 year-old Morning and 12-year-old Christian, this was the place where they spent a lot of their time with positive, fun adults aside from school.

Looking back now, attending the Club and being around staff played a crucial role in their young lives. That’s why they were happy to return to the same Club and take on the role of serving children in their community when the opportunity arose.

“I had this dream of, ‘I want to work here one day,’” Gambler said. “I thought it was the coolest job.”

Under the leadership of Club Director Rory Robinson, Gambler is the Club’s after-school program coordinator while Lopez is a newly-hired teen program coordinator. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Robinson developed an idea to employ former club kids.

“I began thinking about the Club experience from the kids’ standpoint, and who would really understand their needs and struggles,” Robinson said. “I logically arrived at the conclusion that the best staff for the kids would be former Club kids…community members who understand what it’s like to grow up here and to have the Club as a safe haven.”

Aside from having former Club kids to look up to, the Boys and Girls Club of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe is on the quest to instill a new educational format for children to learn from.

“We try to teach the things we don’t think kids get at home or at school such as character development, life skills, or social skills,” Robinson said.

For instance, Robinson has established 5 simple rules at the Club.

“I made it five so they can use one hand to remember them,” he said.

1. No fighting, bullying or gang activity.
2. Respect yourself, others, Staff, and Club equipment.
3. No outside food or drinks
4. No cell phones or other electronic devices
5. Clean up after yourself.

At first glance it just looks like a set of rules, but each one has a character trait built in. One example is rule number five- Clean up after yourself.

“Obviously it alludes to messes and trash but it’s more too.. It’s about learning to clean up your emotional messes, like apologizing when you need to, or being honest about mistakes,” he said. “It teaches our kids that mistakes are OK, but not fixing them, isn’t. We want them to be accountable and independent and self reliant.”

His goal is to change the mindset of a generation. They’re trying to inspire a generation of creators and leaders through this concept of character development.

“The things I’m talking to our kids about aren’t really for them- it’s for their kids,” he explained. “I’ve studied the great chiefs and great leaders of the past. All of them had future generations in mind when they made decisions and sacrifices. I want to be a hero to kids who aren’t even born yet, whether they know my name or not, I’m thinking about them today.”

When Robinson started reaching out to people both Gambler’s and Lopez’s names came up.

“So far they have been great at giving the kids a wonderful afterschool experience,” he added.

When asked if there are any other former club kids that are involved in the club today, Robinson responded no. If more former club members stepped in to volunteer, this would improve the club’s community connection and set forth an ongoing opportunity for locals to positively influence the younger generation.

“If we could get a deeper community buy-in, we could really start to change the future here. When we have one generation helping the other, it creates a chain from our past to our future,” Robinson said. “Right now, we have very little help from within the Reservation itself. We are working on some ideas with a local business, but other than that, all of our volunteers and donors are non-native.”

One of the best ways locals could help is volunteering their time, he said.

“Even if it’s an hour a week tutoring or mentoring, it can mean the world to a kid who needs to see that someone cares,” he said. “That can create a butterfly effect that spreads to everyone.”

The experiences one can gain while guiding young children can also be gratifying. Gambler’s love for children and the desire to be around kids convinced her to apply for the job in 2021. Morning enjoys seeing the unique personalities of the Club’s largest group, the nine- to ten-year-olds. It’s the age where they think they know

everything but they also know they don’t, she said with a grin.

“They’re still young but that’s when you get to see how creative they are…and their imagination,” she said.

When Gambler was little, she looked up to Dani White mostly because of their mutual love for basketball.

“She was someone that I really liked looking up to,” Gambler said. “She influenced me to keep going to school.”

A graduate of Wyoming Indian High School, Gambler eventually enrolled at Eastern Wyoming College and played for the Lady Lancers. She studied physical education but later switched her major to elementary education.

Gambler envisioned that her work would be focused on helping children on the reservation but she would soon find out that her role in the community would turn into something bigger than that.

The job to teach and spend valuable time with children, paired with a pandemic, presented its challenges for the Club. The Club was closed for 16 months due to COVID beginning in 2020 and when it reopened, only a few families registered their children for tutoring or after-school programming mostly due to the heightened fears of transmission.

Once the club reopened, Gambler was hired and eventually the Club was able to schedule family events to offer some sort of normality for the community. She was glad to see children and parent involvement especially during these hard times. To Gambler, this was a positive sign for the well-being of children.

“Kids were isolated,” she said. “I believe that they needed to socialize after being isolated for so long.”

As a kid, the Club was where Gambler found her best friends and met kids from other local schools. It brought her a sense of belonging and a place to be herself. Today, she worries about the kids who spend too much time in front of the TV or the students who are behind in school. She worries that kids are lacking in social skills due to isolation- having seen first-hand some of those effects with some current Club kids.

While she respects the decisions of parents, she also explains to families the importance of kids attending Club programming and tries to reassure them that it’s a safe place to be.

Gambler is planning more activities for Club kids. There are ideas of family night dinners followed by board games and other activities to give kids more opportunities to play sports or bring their families to the club.

Lopez is targeting an even more hard-to-reach group in the community- teenagers. Before Lopez was hired to the Boys & Girls Club, the Club hosted special activities targeting teens including a back to school night, Murder Mystery Dinner, “Seniors Only” Senior Sundae Sus Teen event, and a Glow in the Dark Capture the Flag Spring Teen Takeover. The activities were organized by then-teen coordinator Kyle Quiroz, who has since moved on to work for Fremont County School District 25.

The Club also organized field trips including attendance to University of Wyoming football games, rock climbing, lunch and hikes at the Sinks Canyon and pool time in Lander. The Club hopes to garner a consistent group of teens, Lopez said. To target them, Lopez recognizes that there are “a lot of hoopers” and also that they enjoy the incentive trips.

Lopez, a graduate from Lander Valley High School, went on to study elementary education at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana and later on in Kalispell, Montana. His dreams are to become a high school basketball coach one day and taking the job at the Club was one way to “get his foot in the door,” he said. Before stepping into a school district, Lopez was sure a job at the Club would help him familiarize himself with guiding the young minds of children.

Lopez attended the Fort Washakie club when he was in fifth- through seventh-grade. What he remembers most of those days was when Chingman, who led the teen groups at the time, organized taco night one day out of the week.

One other activity that stood out the most for Lopez was when CrossFit was introduced to Club members.

“That got me into being more active,” he said, noting that he started to work out more often and eventually lost weight.

Lopez saw the Club as a place to get away from home and spend more time with your friends. He also recalls when White and Chingman would share their life experiences with the kids.

“They would travel and tell us about places… they knew about places other than here,” he said, noting that that was a big deal for them back then.

The feeling of fitting in, having new experiences, and the positive energy- that’s what Lopez wants to bring back.

“A lot of our kids, I see them… I see myself in them,” he added. “I can see their potential, but they’re also going through things that I may have gone through too.”

Both Gambler and Lopez found the club to be a place to escape and have fun, while learning from others in their community. They cherished everything about it and that’s what they want for the children of the Fort Washakie club.