Blog

KiDs Beach Club® would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! May the peace and joy of Christmas be with you today and throughout the new year!

How is your family celebrating Jesus’ birthday? The Christmas Story can be found in the Bible in Luke, chapter two. Your child has already heard the Christmas Story in Beach Club, so please take the time to re-read it with your whole family. You can follow our social media posts during the week leading Christmas when we’ll share the Christmas Story there.

Beach Club will resume in early 2016. Be sure to check with the church that sponsors your local Beach Club or your child’s school so they won’t miss any meetings.

With 2016 just around the corner, it seems only appropriate to look back to see what KiDs Beach Club® was able to accomplish this year:

• Since September, 355 children have welcomed Christ into their lives by making Jesus their forever friend. 

• Great Treasure Day has been a tremendous success with more than 17,000 Bibles getting into the hands of children in 2015. 

• The organization added nine new staff members, created separate teams for strategic growth and club relations, and added a senior area director position. Suzanne Massey and Dr. Rod Masteller will join the board January 1. 

• Established a new college internship program in marketing and club relations.

• Paul McCollum added the responsibility of development director and has already implemented new donor-onboarding events, including the KBC Charity Hunt.

• Experienced a 24 percent growth rate, which equates to 35 new clubs, several new school districts and one new state: Louisiana.

• With the gift of a Bible to every kid in every Beach Club, found new ways to teach them how to be hands on with their new Bibles. Implemented new “Hang 10” pages that encourage kids to spend 10 minutes each day reading their Bible.

• Made commitment to offer a summer camp, which will start in July 2016. The goal is to help kids take what they learn at Beach Club to a new level and become leaders for Christ on their school campuses.

• Built database of 24,000 contacts in email distribution program that we regularly communicate to with the monthly Surf Report and Bibles for Beach Club e-newsletters. Our subscribers also get messages about other events like North Texas Giving Day and #GivingTuesday. 

• The organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are seeing new followers daily and we added Instagram and Vimeo accounts to help us better engage with our community and tell the incredible stories in KiDs Beach Club, including Great Treasure Day. Be sure to like us at @KiDsBeachClub and share our content. Share your own content by using the #KiDsBeachClub hashtag.

• KBC moved into a new corporate office space in Bedford, Texas the last week of 2015, thanks to a surprise donor who offered up office space in his building. There are currently 14 offices with additional room that will allow our ministry to continue to grow.

We could not do it with our donors, volunteers, staff and of course our amazing Beach Club kids. Our wins are your wins. Thank you for your support!

If you have not yet made a year-end gift to KiDs Beach Club®, your support would be appreciated. Click here to make a tax-deductible gift before the December 31 deadline.

KiDs Beach Club® began handing out a Bible to every child in every Beach Club last spring when the organization implemented Great Treasure Day. A total of 10,886 children received a Bible last spring. This fall, another 6,891 children received their own copy of God’s Word.

A quick look at the math shows that 17,777 children have received a Bible as a result of Great Treasure Day. Anyone recognize the symbolism with that total? God's provided for that need almost to the penny.

Don’t forget to mark your calendar so you can join us at the next Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner & Auction April 16, 2016 at the Hurst Conference Center so we can continue handing out God’s Word to children in public schools.

SUPPORT BIBLES FOR BEACH CLUB

With 2015 coming to a close, we want to gently remind you that the deadline is rapidly approaching for you to get the tax benefit of a gift to KiDs Beach Club®.

Your generous gifts greatly support the work we’re doing at KiDs Beach Club®. We’re impacting communities for God’s Kingdom, sharing Christ in public schools, fostering life change in the hearts of children and we’re connecting families to a church family. Together, let’s connect kids to Christ and put Bibles in their hands.

MAKE A GIFT TO KIDS BEACH CLUB®

KBC is an IRS qualified 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your year-end gift allows you to beat the December 31 deadline for calendar year tax deductions.

Dr. Tonya Mamantov, Floyd Elementary from KiDs Beach Club on Vimeo.

KiDs Beach Club® recently partnered with Hickory Tree Baptist Church in Balch Springs, Texas to start a Beach Club at Floyd Elementary in nearby Mesquite. 

Five elementary schools in Mesquite Independent School District already offered KiDs Beach Club®, but not Floyd, where Dr. Tonya Mamantov became principal in 2014. She had worked as an assistant principal at Porter Elementary, where they had a Beach Club, and taught at Hanby, which added a Beach Club after she left to be the principal at Floyd. 

She has been praying for KiDs Beach Club® to come to her school since she arrived. Her prayers did not fall on deaf ears and God began to work.

Shortly, God sent Hickory Tree pastor Alex Gonzales to visit the school. When he stopped by to see how his church could help the school, Mamantov invited him into her office and began telling him about KBC. She pulled up the organization’s website and planted a seed.

Gonzales returned to his church and mentioned KiDs Beach Club® to the church’s Children’s Pastor Jason Points, who went out to his car and retrieved a folder he received from KBC Executive Director Cindy Leach in October.

This string of events was clearly orchestrated by God. The new Beach Club starts in February. 

To hear more from Dr. Tonya Mamantov and her thoughts on the benefits for schools in partnering with KiDs Beach Club®, watch the video above.

GIVE TO KIDS BEACH CLUB

Christmas is just around the corner. Do you need a gift idea for the person or group of people, like your coworkers, who you just don’t know what to buy? 

The legal assistants at Dawson & Sodd LLP, a law firm with offices in Dallas and Corsicana, came up with a great idea for their attorneys last Christmas.

“Last December, it came time to buy the attorneys Christmas gifts and they’re always hard to buy for,” Tanya Norris, a paralegal at the firm, told KiDs Beach Club® in an interview last winter. “We talked about donating money or our time to a charity that each one cares about. We were all trying to come up with ideas of which charity to donate to.

“It was funny because not more than 5-10 minutes after having that discussion with all the girls, I received an email from Beach Club. It was a few days before #GivingTuesday when I got that email so I just felt like that was God’s way of telling me that is what He would have us do. So we did that.”

In Tanya’s 18 years with the firm, she has seen how God has blessed the people there, saying that everyone has a story on how God has made an impact in their lives.

“There are a lot of organizations that are dear to everyone there and they all start with God and His blessings,” said Norris, whose son Cameron attended the Beach Club at Malakoff Elementary the last two years. “We decided the best way to repay that was to share the news of Him.”

Norris gave each one of the attorneys a letter at their annual Christmas party that pointed out how everyone at the firm had been blessed.

“We gave them my letter with the information from Beach Club,” Norris said. “No one really read it that night at the party. It was really in the days after when they gave us a thank you card or told us how much that meant and there wasn’t really a better gift that could have been given.

“Some of (the attorneys) said that was the best gift they ever received. We were just so glad to do that for them and they were so glad that we did.”

Cameron received one of the 24 weekly Bibles each club passed out before the organization started Great Treasure Day this past spring in response to the generous support of donors at the 2014 Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner and Auction.

The gift the legal assistants gave to their attorneys last Christmas went directly toward providing Bibles for every child at Malakoff Elementary when they held Great Treasure Day last February.

Cameron had already brought home his Bible last fall. It had been just a few weeks before the letter arrived from Beach Club encouraging donations for the Bibles for Beach Club program so that every child in every Beach Club can receive their own copy of God’s Word.

“I think it’s wonderful. Many kids would never have a Bible otherwise,” Norris said. “There are so many kids, there are so many families that need to have Jesus.

“It’s impossible to get into every home and share the Word with everyone who needs it, but it’s easy to donate some money, even enough money for one Bible or whatever you can donate. That Bible gets into that home and that child may pick it up and mom may pick it up or dad may pick it up, and it can change the entire families. You can just change their lives.” 

If you’re interested in giving KiDs Beach Club® Explorer’s Study Bibles this Christmas season, you can do that by clicking here.