Books and Buckets, an educational basketball summer program for Washington neighborhood youth, is returning for its second summer this Saturday, June 4.
“It’s more than just a basketball course. It’s also what’s going on in your mind,” said founder David McGill-Soriano, who grew up in the Washington neighborhood. “All summer the kids worked on their game, their brain and the local community work.”
In his youth, McGill-Soriano was involved with “negative influences,” he said, and ended up joining a youth basketball program across town.
The one-hour commute to the program was worth it, McGill-Soriano said.
“That youth program pretty much changed things around for me, changed my life, my viewpoint,” he said. “I went from a kid who was not really worried about school, getting into fights, suspended, all the way to a kid who really started taking the classroom seriously, because I started taking my sport more seriously.”
Later in life, McGill-Soriano reflected on the lives of his fellow classmates who didn’t have the opportunity to join a youth program.
“Where they ended up, what ended up happening, what they ended up getting involved in, I felt for them,” McGill-Soriano said. “I thought, ‘I wish more of my local neighbors could have been part of it.’”
After graduating from CSULB, he set his sights back on the Washington area—if there was a program closer to his neighborhood, he reasoned, maybe more kids could benefit from the same mentorship that helped put him on a better path.
In 2021, Books and Buckets came to fruition, a basketball camp with a twist: on top of learning basketball fundamentals, participants also read a book during the program, take lessons on civic engagement and organize a community impact project.
This year, participating members will read “Mamba Mentality” by Kobe Bryant—“It’s a real book that focuses on present state and being in the moment and capturing hold of it,” McGill-Soriano said, a theme that rings true with Books and Buckets’ mission to take hold of their community’s destiny.
“You know, the Washington neighborhood, there’s a lot of challenges. It’s a beautiful neighborhood with a lot of strengths and culture,” McGill Soriano said. “We’re very resilient because we have to be.”
At the end of last year’s program, youth participants organized a community cleanup and a gang violence prevention panel with local Long Beach leaders.
“I think everyone chose it because there’s a lot of gang violence around the area,” said Mario Solorzano, a high schooler who’s coming back for his second year with Books and Buckets. “Some days it’s chill. But like I said, there’s a lot of gang violence, so you have to be careful. Some people might just be around the area and they like to mess around with people.”
The Washington neighborhood is located in District 1, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city of Long Beach. The district also has the highest concentration of poverty in Long Beach—one in every four families live below the federal poverty line.
The civic engagement portion of the program, McGill-Soriano said, is to create a “recipe” to support students’ development and, in turn, support the development of the Washington neighborhood.
“[We’re] trying to focus on the agency of, ‘You’re not just trying to make it out, you’re trying to make it better,’” he said. “Your neighborhood, you can make a change for the better, you can really claim it as yours.”
McGill-Soriano doesn’t plan to expand the programs to other areas. There’s more to be done in the Washington neighborhood, he said, and he wants the youth in the program to be part of the “momentum” that helps change the community for the better.
“We are a legit place-based neighborhood program,” he said. “We’re not just trying to be a shiny trophy youth program, we’re actually really trying to see levels of systems change […] with our youth at the forefront.”
Initially, Solorzano didn’t want to join Books and Buckets, despite his friends’ protests. He started hanging out at the courts just to “see what was happening.” He started going every Saturday and eventually joined the program.
“It looked like fun,” Solorzano said. “There’s something new every time I go, and the people, just strangers, you just get along with them. Everyone likes to do it. I don’t mind playing basketball every day and it’s fun.”
Solorzano, who is graduating from Reid High School in two weeks, is a “leader” in the program, according to McGill-Soriano.
He takes after McGill-Soriano in some ways.
“It’s not just basketball that we’re trying to improve on,” Solorzano said. “We’re trying to lead the community to grow something better.”
The Books and Buckets free summer youth program will begin this Saturday, June 4. Students will meet every Saturday for eight weeks at the Washington Middle School Basketball Gym.
Registration is closed for this year’s summer program. To learn more about Books and Buckets, visit www.booksandbuckets.org.
