Middle Management

Two months ago, JMU sent a spring break team to the DR for a 1 week outreach, like they do every year. This year was particularly exciting for me because I had 2 JMU students, CJ (the IV staff worker), and a bank president from Florida with me at my site. It was a great week for me and the students and they also made a lasting impact on my work here.

One afternoon during the week, I presented a problem I had that I needed them to solve: When I started the boys club it was with only about 10 boys and it was easy for me to find them each jobs every week and then be around to verify that they're doing them. However, over the past year as my main job (MicroBanks) started to take off, so did the boys site. 8 months into the club over 50 boys were involved it was impossible for me to find and verify so many jobs.

After some brainstorming they came up with a genius idea: Middle Management. I elect and train leaders (boys from the club) that are in charge of their own work crew. The leaders get paid for finding and overseeing the jobs of their crew. In turn the leaders get a Ryan Dollars salary plus a commission on every job successfully completed by their crew. They are given a total amount that their crew can earn each week and are responsible for choosing how much to pay for each job they selected and then who gets what job. They want to give their best workers the best paying jobs but they have to balance that with their younger workers who don't want to be taken advantage of.

Over the past 8 weeks I've been training the leaders about how it all works and about what it means to be a leader. We studied the life of Jesus to learn that leadership means service. Each week I help the boys manage problems in their group and assess them on their job quality. Every 10 weeks all the managers doing a good job will get to join me on a special trip to the movies, the beach or a baseball game.

It has been a complete success. I have 7 leaders, each with 5-member crews. I gave each of them a fancy padfolio to maintain all their records. It's wonderful, but also really funny, to see all these boys walking around El Callejon like little inspectors.

Pray that God would use all this to teach these boys about male leadership, which is something El Callejon desperately needs.


Josh and Will were the brains of the idea. While they were thinking of this great idea CJ was defacing my currency with pirate patches and cowboy hats.


Fill up 1 bag of trash from the street: $250 de Ryan


Francis and I before a bike ride. He has been my most faithful follower and God has really worked in his life through the site. He's in charge of his own crew, Los Fuertes, and he loves every minute of it.