Boys & Girls Clubs of Carson

Volunteer: Elaine Wassil

Boys & Girls Clubs of Carson's (BGCC) mission is to enable all young people to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens by creating a safe, engaging, and equitable space for every child in the greater Los Angeles South Bay region – one of the Nation’s most diverse communities.

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Elaine Wassil began volunteering with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Carson after retiring from her career as a teacher and school administrator with a focus on Special Education and learning and behavior disorders. From the beginning, Elaine has demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to working with BGCC's youth – some of the most vulnerable and at-risk in Los Angeles County – and empowering them to be enthusiastic and successful learners. Seeing the scope of need, exacerbated by the pandemic, Elaine has gone further and helped to create a pilot program called Literacy Leaders, in which middle school students under her supervision can mentor elementary grade students, further cementing learning for the middle school children while also helping the younger students. The Literacy Leaders program she has created will be an impactful avenue for remediation of pandemic-exacerbated learning loss. In not only volunteering her time and energy every single day, but also creating an entire program and helping to recruit other volunteers, Elaine has gone so above and beyond the usual scope of volunteering, and her impact has already stretched exponentially into the next several years and will potentially impact thousands of youth over time.