Hello, my name is Joshua Galvan and I am leading the Southland Jiu Jitsu Club. This initiative was started as a response to some of the events happening in our community and to make Brazilian Jiu Jitsu accessible to inner city teens and adults. In our church, we have several students whom in attending public schools have been faced with bullying, mild cases of assault, and mental insecurity in carrying on in their day to day lives. We also noticed that due to some of these issues, other issues started to rise. We saw an uptick in aggression, insecurity, self doubt, and decline in physical fitness. As a 4th degree brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (Bjj), over the years I have seen the positive impact Bjj has made on kids, teens, and adults. Some of these benefits include increase in discipline, self esteem, confidence, physical fitness, community, and the ability to see oneself as more than a victim. While there was all these benefits to be had, there were some logistical complications. One of the main complications that had risen was money for these folks to train at a gym. So I offered myself as a volunteer to teach classes and our church, Southland Christian Church, had been so gracious in letting us use their facility.

The struggle we are currently facing is mat space. The desire to train has grown and so has the costs to buy mats. At this moment, we have limited mat space because I have brought all of my personal mats to train, but that limitation insists that we cap classes. The mats we are desiring to buy is a size of 20 Feet x 20 Feet and that averages out to $1,900 to get a good quality set of mats to allow us to train safely and effectively.

Whatever you can donate helps a lot and the fruition of the giving can be seen on social media via my own Instagram handle: Tito_Shando.