Fletch's Perspective October 2026 - Friends & Neighbors of Martin County

Keith Fletcher

Boys & Girls Clubs of Martin County, President & CEO

It’s getting closer.

We’ll soon swing open the blue doors of the new Hobe Sound Club and invite members to experience the exciting features of an advanced learning environment and the warmth and welcome that makes them feel at home.

We recently invited community members to join us in celebrating the topping-off ceremony of the new club coming to the 5-acre parcel at the northwest corner of SE Lares Avenue and SE Edwyn Street. We’re aiming to open in late spring.

The 28,142-square-foot building will offer a teen center, a gymnasium with an advanced lighting system, and programming space of nearly 5,000 square feet suited for hands-on, experiential workforce development exposure and training, as well as a commercial kitchen for our culinary team.

The grounds surrounding the club will include an expansive garden area, outdoor classroom, soccer field with an 800-square-foot field house and scoreboard that doubles as a screen. The parking lot and dropoff/pickup route are configured to maximize safety and convenience for our members and their families.

I’m extremely proud of our staff and design and construction team and very pleased with our experience working with Martin County.

This undertaking evoked a different range of emotions than our previous construction project—the Greater Stuart Club spanning 39,000 square feet in East Stuart, which opened in 2024. In that case, we had a blank canvas of 3.6 acres thanks to an agreement with the Martin County School District.

Creating the new Hobe Sound Club meant tearing down the facility that had served the Boys & Girls Clubs of Martin County since the early 1990s.

BGCMC started with Peggy Cole and Hays Clark in 1989. They were dedicated to establishing a safe space for young people—especially those from challenging circumstances—to gather, have fun, play sports, make friends and get help with homework.

Our inaugural club took up two storefronts in the Winn-Dixie plaza on Bridge Road. Early staff members remember using grocery carts to move books and computers into the building. Its 2,800 square feet accommodated 175 members aged 6 to 18.

Thanks to the generosity of the community and fundraisers such as the “Steak & Burger Dinner” at Jupiter Island Club—in which the donors dined on burgers and the kids ate steaks—enough money was raised to move out of the storefront. Spanning 9,500 square feet, the Hobe Sound club on Lares Avenue opened in 1993. The gym was added a few years later.

The former site served the community, too, hosting public soccer tournaments, Hobe Sound Chamber breakfasts, gardening demonstrations, even a butterfly release.

Fortunately, the future Hobe Sound Club will serve in the same capacity. We’ll make it available for the community to enjoy as much as possible.

An article published in The Stuart News on July 4, 1992, quoted Peter Fleischmann, BCGMC’s then executive director, on the kids learning “social skills and educational values that hopefully will stay with them all their lives.”

What I find most comforting in revisiting stories of our humble beginnings is how consistent we remain to the spirit that inspired our founding. Across five clubs for 1,000 members in our daily care and more than 10,000 impacted annually through our programming, BGCMC continues to instill values and habits that transform lives.

Our core emphasis on citizenship, academics and healthy lifestyles starts early. It’s the throughline in the STEAM courses, gardening activities, art projects, recreational time, even homework help, we offer to our kindergarteners through fifth graders.

Even as our middle- and high-schoolers grow and gain access to leadership principles, workforce labs and increased opportunities for responsibility, they’re taught the importance of respecting others, respecting themselves and respecting their choices.

It begins in an atmosphere where they’re fully accepted, encouraged, and valued.

That commitment—whether kindergartners or high school seniors, whether at the clubs of the past or the future—is always awaiting them on the other side of the blue doors.



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