Please consider making a donation to Boston Youth Wrestling today!

Update (July 5, 2019) — Thanks to our generous supporters (which included 23 individual donors) and the Good People Fund, we were able to raise $20,000 in just TWO WEEKS! We thank everyone for their continued support of our mission and our programming.

Boston, MA — We are thrilled to announce a $10,000 match challenge from The Good People Fund to be matched by $10,000 in unrestricted gifts from individual donors to Boston Youth Wrestling. BYW hopes this match challenge will inspire gifts from first-time donors as well as re-engaged donors. Gifts of any size will be matched 1:1.

Founded in 2008, The Good People Fund provides financial support and management guidance to small and mid-sized, highly effective non-profits, headed by dynamic Good People who are devoted to tikkun olam (repairing the world). The Good People Fund help donors achieve a maximum of good with each dollar spent by connecting them with the Good Person whose work best realizes their personal goals for tzedakah (to do the right thing by giving). We also welcome undesignated gifts that we direct to projects where the need is greatest.

They target inspired non-profit entrepreneurs who operate with low overhead and on a personal scale, who have developed creative solutions to poverty, hunger, disability, trauma recovery, social isolation and other significant challenges—but whose work would otherwise go unsupported. Most of our grantees are based in the U.S. and Israel, but our Good People reach out to communities beyond, as well. Their goal is to strengthen their grantees as they grow into self-sustaining organizations.

In keeping with our philosophy that the vast majority of donor dollars should support those being served, we maintain a lean operating budget. Most of the salaries for our small staff are underwritten, as are a significant proportion of other operating costs.

Building on their mission of tikkun olam, we go beyond the act of giving to educate future donors about the meaning and power of tzedakah—and how they can best use their own talents and resources to do good works.

Started in 2012 by founder José Valenzuela, a veteran BPS classroom teacher of 10 years, Boston Youth Wrestling has grown today to serve 500 youth in Boston, Chelsea, and Lynn across 17 program sites throughout the school year and the summer. Using wrestling as a tool and motivator, BYW teaches youth to successfully overcome socio-economic challenges that lead to educational gaps, poor health and negative community relationships, imparting skills such as self reliance, discipline and commitment to others that apply both on and off the mat, in school and beyond. Today BYW offers three core school-based wrestling programming partnership levels called “Engage,” “Enrich,” and “Evolve.”

We are thrilled to have been selected by The Good People Fund, and thank them for the confidence in our organization and our mission and work.