By Tracy McCormick-Dishman
John Gilbert Sr. has spent almost 30 years making sure Fernandina Beach kids had somewhere to go after school, someone to check their homework and, if they needed it, a hot meal. This summer, for the first time since 1998, that somewhere will not be run by him.
Gilbert, founder of America’s Youth Inc., retired June 30. He said his health has been declining and that was the deciding factor.
“Yeah, my health is deteriorating,” Gilbert told the NewsLine.
He was careful to say the organization is not closing. He is stepping back from day-to-day leadership, not walking away from the mission.
“I sure hope so,” Gilbert said when asked whether America’s Youth would continue without him.
As for what comes next for him personally, Gilbert was not ready to say much. He described it only as a continuation of the calling that led him to found America’s Youth in the first place.
“Same direction, bigger project,” Gilbert said.
Six kids under the trees
Gilbert, a disabled U.S. Army veteran and Fernandina Beach native, played football at Florida A&M University and attended officer candidate school before returning home. He worked in manufacturing and coached basketball before America’s Youth became his full-time calling.
The program started small: six students, working on track and field and cross-country, with practices held outdoors before the group found space in a local church. It later moved into what Gilbert remembers as Macedonia.
Two of those early athletes qualified for the national junior olympics four years in a row, and it was that early success, and the demand it created, that pushed the program to grow.
“Other kids wanted to run track, but they didn’t have the grades,” Gilbert said. “So we started doing an after-school program, and it grew from that.”
The organization’s name came almost by accident. Gilbert said he set out to incorporate under a different name.
“We were gonna incorporate Dreams Incorporated, but they told me that wasn’t mine,” Gilbert said. “They told me it was America’s Youth, and it’s been America’s Youth ever since. So it was God who put it together.”
By 2013, the program had outgrown borrowed space and moved into a permanent home at 907 S. 11th St., a former Boys and Girls Club building in the neighborhood it serves.
No fees, no paid staff
From that small beginning, America’s Youth built out the programs that have defined it for a generation: the After School program, Camp America in the summer, a Community Technology Learning Center open to youth and their families, and an Entrepreneur Training Program that teaches teens how to run a small business. The organization also stepped in to run the Interfaith Dinner Network, taking it over from the Homeless Coalition after liability concerns made the arrangement harder to sustain, Gilbert said. Local churches and volunteers supply the food, and America’s Youth families get access to it.
Roughly 40 children a year, ages nine to 18, have gone through the after-school program in recent years. Camp America once drew as many as 60 kids in a summer and has more recently settled around 45. None of them pay a fee, and the organization has no paid staff.
“There is no fee,” Gilbert said. “It started that way because the people who were in need couldn’t afford childcare, and they couldn’t afford the kids to be in an after-school program. Unless somebody paid the fees, they were left out.”
Gilbert has described the guiding philosophy behind the program the same way for years: keep kids busy, keep them accountable and keep them out of trouble.
“Our thing was at-risk children, building playgrounds and not jailhouses,” Gilbert said.
He said the harder lesson isn’t behavior, it’s preparation for adulthood.
“They teach how to get along, but they don’t teach them how to survive,” Gilbert said. “They don’t know finance. They don’t know business. So what I was doing is inserting them on jobs, teaching them the proper way to run a business, with an entrepreneur program.”
Alumni who made it
Gilbert points to alumni as the clearest evidence the program works. Early runners went on to the national junior olympics. Others became certified nursing assistants, joined the military or graduated from Florida A&M University. One recent graduate, Passion Roberts, is headed to the University of Miami this fall, Gilbert said. Over more than 25 years, graduates of the program have gone on to become doctors, nurses, legal professionals and community leaders.
Gilbert’s own record of service predates America’s Youth. In April 1989, he received the first Elsie Harper Volunteer of the Year award, recognizing 20 years of volunteer youth work in Nassau County at the time.
“If I can save one kid from going astray, it’s important,” Gilbert said at the time.
Three decades and thousands of kids later, he still measures the work the same way.
“I had a saying: if I can save one, I think I’ve fulfilled my job,” Gilbert has said of the program’s mission. “I think I’ve saved more than one.”
A community built on faith
America’s Youth has run for most of its history without a marketing budget or paid grant writers, relying instead on churches, volunteers and word of mouth. Its annual traditions, the bookbag and school supply giveaway, the Community Christmas Party and Lighted Christmas Parade, and fundraising concerts like the 25th anniversary Drifters White Christmas show in 2023, have become fixtures in Fernandina Beach.
Gilbert has never described the work as his own doing. “You raised me,” Gilbert has said, reflecting on the community that shaped him. “You sent me off to school. You sent me to a war I didn’t want to go to. And I came back home because God saw fit for me to do a little more. With that, He gave me America’s Youth Incorporated.”
As he closes this chapter, Gilbert said his message to the community is a simple one.
“Thank you for supporting America’s Youth and John Gilbert and his endeavors with the local kids,” Gilbert said.
