Tom Lynch and Marc De Baptiste started the Delray Beach chapter of the Boys and Girls Club in 1997 and have helped it grow ever since.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Emily J. Minor
Every community has people like Tom Lynch and Marc De Baptiste. Funny. Kind. Civic-minded.
But not every community has people who put their time and talent where their mouth is, like Tom Lynch and Marc De Baptiste.
Consider: Twenty years ago, De Baptiste, a longtime Delray Beach commercial real estate guy, was, shall we say, lassoed into volunteering with the Boys & Girls Club of Broward County.
“I was asked by a dear friend to participate in their meetings in Fort Lauderdale,” De Baptiste remembers.
The meetings, he says, were at night — which meant he’d get off the freeway at Atlantic Avenue and drive east, toward his home. “One night it just dawned on me that if there was a need for a Boys and Girls Club in any community, it was right here in Delray Beach.”
So, he called someone he knew who had just the right combination of being politically well-placed and community-minded: Tom Lynch.
“I think I had just come on as mayor,” says Lynch, the former Delray Beach mayor who owns one of South Florida’s largest insurance companies. “I didn’t know much about the Boys & Girls Club.”
Today, it’s a whole different story.
The Boys & Girls Club has been helping America’s youth get through imperfect family, social and economical situations since the late 1800s — when it was started in Hartford, Conn., for just boys. It wasn’t until 1990 that the club changed its name to include girls, and they’ve grown in leaps and bounds ever since. Today, there are an estimated 4,000 chapters across America, 14 of them in Palm Beach County.
In Delray Beach, the club started small, of course, at first making its home at the old Carver Middle School. In 1998, the program moved to the former Catherine Strong Center. But that space was also small, and very bare bones. For a while, the club had to turn away kids.
De Baptiste knew this would never do, so he and Lynch started a fund-raising effort to build the club a place all its own. The Naoma Donnelley Haggin Boys & Girls Club opened as a new multimillion-dollar facility in 2006. (Haggin donated $1.5 million when she died.)
Last month, club leaders gave Lynch and De Baptiste the Service to the Youth Award.
For the most part, the club offers young residents a place to go when their home isn’t an option. Maybe it’s after school. Maybe it’s on weekends. Perhaps it’s first thing in the morning.
De Baptiste says he’s loved watching the program grow. He’s also loved watching all the young people grow into amazing adults — everything from attorneys and teachers to business leaders and club volunteers.
“Quite simply, these children would go home to an empty house if they couldn’t go here and, frankly, knowing that the club wants them is a wonderful opportunity for us all,” he says.
“Children want to be wanted.”
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