Ball for All at Centennial Elementary School
by Jerry Garcia, Breeding Site Lead at Bayer’s Waco, NE, Breeding Facility, Crop Science, Bayer U.S.
When I found out that local kids in our neighborhood didn’t even have a ball they could play with at home, my heart sank. Here’s how our team at Bayer turned that around.
One of the pillars of how we operate — and how we bring Bayer’s vision of Health for All, Hunger for None to life — is through community outreach and engagement. Back in 2019, I met with public school leaders from the Utica, Nebraska, Centennial school system to explore ways we could partner with them to make a difference in the community.
We have a history of working with the school, which is only a few miles from the Bayer facility in Waco, NE. When the middle-school curriculum was about genetics and breeding, Dr. Clint Turnbull, the Commercial Corn Breeder from our site, talked to 7th and 8th graders on the topics. We are also lined up for Career Day with high schoolers in the spring. We will help the junior and senior classes with their resumes and interviewing skills and have a general conversation about a career in the industry.
It is a great partnership and we wanted to do more. Our plan was rapidly developing, until — you guessed it — COVID-19 changed everything, just as it has with so many other activities. Although we had to put our plans on hold, I told the teachers to reach out directly to me if there was something we could do for them as they navigated their new ways of teaching.
Elementary school physical education teacher Jake Polk took me up on my offer. He reached out with an idea he’d been mulling over for a while: Ball for All. Jake said that kids often asked if they could borrow a ball because they didn’t have one. Ball for All would put a ball into the hands of every elementary school kid to take home. At first, it made me sad to think some kids didn’t have a ball to play with at home. But my second thought was better: “What a great solution for the kids and a great fit for our Health for All vision at Bayer!”
Working with our community liaison, our head of manufacturing next door to us and our promotional items vendor, we figured out how to fund the request and got it done. In addition to finding the funds, it was rather urgent to get the balls to the kids while they were still coming into the school building, since a spike in COVID-19 cases may have them revert to remote learning at any time. On Friday, November 13, 240 kids at Centennial Elementary School went home with their choice of a football, basketball or volleyball bearing both the Bayer logo and the Centennial school logo.
It was a team effort with the teachers, the girls’ varsity basketball coach and a few of us from the Waco site. I, unfortunately, was home in quarantine due to COVID-19, but got great reports about how excited and happy the kids were. What a great way to show our community that Bayer cares!
Thanks to Bayer and everyone involved in Ball for All.
