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Tyra Banks puts Girls Club in zone with glitzy benefit

Model-philanthropist and Girls Club sponsor Tyra Banks, left, and Girls Club executive director Lyn Pentecost enjoyed a conversation onstage during Thursday’s million-dollar fundraiser for the organization’s new building, which is scheduled to open next fall. Photo by Sam Spokony

BY SAM SPOKONY  |  It’s been a long road for the Lower Eastside Girls Club, one full of the same challenges and growing pains felt by the very girls the club has taken in, inspired and educated during the past 16 years.

Thanks to a massive, unprecedented expansion, the Girls Club is set to grow into a new building — now nearing completion — that will triple the organization’s program capacity. In that it’s taken hard work, determination and creativity to reach this point, it’s clear that the Girls Club has done no less than epitomize the very ideals it’s sought to communicate to others.

“It’s always been one of those little engines that could,” said Lyn Pentecost, Girls Club executive director. “This engine just happened to have a couple of hundred incredible people pushing it forward.”

That collaborative push was certainly on display last Thursday, when model-turned-philanthropist Tyra Banks, one of the organization’s major sponsors, hosted a star-powered fundraiser for the new building that brought in more than $1 million in one evening.

The new Girls Club building — which includes a wing named for (and run in partnership with) Banks and her seven-year-old TZONE charitable foundation — has been a $20 million project. The new club house comprises 30,000 square feet, and features a planetarium, arts studios, a “Science and Environmental Education Center” and a “Library and Academic Support Center.”

At the building’s TZONE wing, the girls will learn about goal setting, healthy lifestyles, improving self-esteem and leadership skills in general.

The project will also feature 78 mixed-income residential units. The Girls Club won’t own these units and won’t get any income from them.

Located on Avenue D between E. Seventh and E. Eighth Sts., the building is scheduled to open in fall 2013.

As the Girls Club has always done for years in its current office at E. First St. and First Ave., the new building will provide free services to neighborhood girls ages 8 to 18, and its increased size will allow programming for more than 1,500 girls per week. Nearly all of the girls in the organization’s programs come from struggling, low-income families.

Thursday’s fundraiser, at the swanky Capitale venue on Bowery, drew around 500 contributors who were constantly reminded of the importance the new center will have on its community.

“We’re raising this money to give these girls an opportunity, because it’s an opportunity they deserve to have,” Banks told the crowd as the evening began. “A lot of the time, the cards we’re dealt are based on where we’re born and where we live. But I feel like my girls, most of whom are in the [East Village] housing projects, deserve just the same as those who are born and live on the Upper East Side.”

High-profile guests at the fundraiser included actress Rosario Dawson (who is also a Girls Club board member), news anchor Soledad O’Brien, entertainer Clay Aiken, actor John Leguizamo and hip-hop artist Drake, who performed to close the gathering. Celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson was also on hand to curate a world-class dinner menu, which for this reporter was the highlight of the evening, if not the entire year.

In addition, several local elected officials, who all provided support throughout the Girls Club’s growth, joined in Thursday’s festivities. Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, who joked that he came in through the side entrance rather than down the “yellow carpet” with the celebrities, nevertheless praised Banks’s contributions, and lauded Pentecost’s evolving vision for the organization.

“I was involved with the Girls Club even before I took office [in 2007], and it’s been absolutely incredible to watch them expand so rapidly, while also focusing on developing programs that really engage the girls and integrate them into the community,” Kavanagh said. “They’ve done a great job of promoting all of the things young women in our society should be, as well as the paths to success they should be encouraged to think about.”

And the gathering really hit home for one rising star who attended the fundraiser, that being 30-year-old actress Tina Huang, who’s played supporting roles in major films and TV shows, and most recently has been featured on the Nickelodeon TV series “Hollywood Heights.”

Huang was born in Texas but raised from the age of 4 in Chinatown, where she said she and her low-income parents lived in an illegal apartment on St. James Place, until Huang moved into the East Village years later when she attended New York University. She began attending programs at the Girls Club when she was 15, shortly after the organization formed, and recalled its early challenges but also its importance in her life.

“It was a small staff at that time, mostly just moms from the neighborhood, and it was really just after-school activities rather than the variety of programs they have now,” Huang said. “But it was absolutely a second home environment for me, which was incredibly important because I couldn’t get a lot of attention from my parents because they worked all day, and we were still so poor that they just couldn’t afford after-school programs.”

Huang was lighthearted while chatting with fellow celebs on Thursday, but her ties to the roots of the Girls Club, as well as her own veritable rags-to-riches story, drew out even deeper emotions as she talked about the new building coming to fruition.

“I caught myself almost crying a few times, just because I know how difficult it is to accomplish that kind of thing,” she explained. “It’s pretty moving, and I’m so ridiculously proud of Lyn and all the staff members. It opens this whole world of possibility, and most importantly it shows that it wasn’t just a dream — it’s always been an achievable goal.”

After the fundraiser, Pentecost told this newspaper that she plans to hold a series of soft openings for the Girls Club building this coming spring, in advance of the grand opening in the fall. Among those will be a Mother’s Day event, and a gathering in partnership with the V-Day activist organization, which seeks to end violence against women and girls (and of which Rosario Dawson is also a board member).

“It’s great. It’ll be like a whole year of openings,” Pentecost said, with a laugh.

And even though the new building hasn’t yet begun its ambitious programming, the Girls Club’s seemingly tireless executive director is, yet again, looking toward the future.

Noting that the organization already attracts interns from colleges around the country, Pentecost explained that, a few years down the road, she hopes to take advantage of the new building’s size by hosting training seminars for adults from other states who wish to learn more about community organizing and effective ways to build neighborhood nonprofits.

“Hopefully they’d be able to go back to their communities and do similar programs, by taking away something from the philosophy we’re putting in place,” she said.