Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Terry Nichols, 25, a program leader for 9- to 10-year-olds at the Boys and Girls Club on Ninth Street, sweeps before Friday's open house. The addition includes expanded multiuse rooms and office space.

Sherry Thurman (left), with Communications for Allstate Insurance, hugs Becci Emanuelson, Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia executive director, before a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday.

Shaquikla Hill, 11, (left) a fifth-grader at Huff Lane MicroVillage, and Kayla Bush, 11, a fifth-grader at Morningside Elementary, go through each other's purses at a picnic table at the Boys and Girls Club on Ninth Street after school on Friday.

Roanoke school children get off the bus and walk down the driveway to the Boys and Girls Club on Ninth Street on Friday afternoon.

And to think, Becci Emanuelson almost said: Thanks, but no thanks.

When a stranger called out of the blue two years ago to ask if she wanted the old desks and chairs that Patrick Henry High School was about to throw away, the director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia recalls thinking: Our kids don't deserve junk.

But the caller had a certain enthusiasm that Emanuelson knew better than to discourage. Later, when the woman showed up asking for a tour and mentioned that she was actually a scout for a foundation run by Doris Buffett -- the sister of multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett -- it would all become clear.

Doris Buffett -- aka the Sunshine Lady -- would end up donating $500,000 to the Ninth Street center, enough for Emanuelson to realize her dream of opening a teen center, which was dedicated Friday.

To Emanuelson, it was the cherry on top of her eight-year tenure at the center and the realization that, as she put it: "My work is done here."

Emanuelson, 36 and a self-described "left-handed, big-picture visionary," is leaving the organization at the end of the month. She said she wants to make room for new energy and leadership and to try out some new things.

The organization serves 630-plus children in Roanoke, another 150 in the New River Valley and 625 in Martinsville and Henry County -- a far cry from its humble beginnings, which included a single community room at Landsdowne Park housing development and a dilapidated building on Ninth Street southeast.

The new teen center, housed in an addition to the Ninth Street center, features a computer area and separate homework space for teens, along with foosball, pingpong and pool tables.

For the first time, the club's teenagers won't be forced to study and play games with kids half their age or, worse, not show up at the center at all.

"Our kids were getting older, and we literally didn't have room for them," Emanuelson said.

Roanoke Valley board President Dan Layman recalls the trouble the center had attracting teenagers when it opened in 1997 -- with the hope of lowering Roanoke's above-average rates in teen pregnancy and school dropouts.

"We figured it was best to just grow our own teenage members as the kids got older," said Layman, who praised Emanuelson for her leadership, passion and "great ability to connect with people."

Some area nonprofits were leery of the club when it first opened, worried that it might pull some of their own donors away, but Emanuelson has managed to collaborate not only with other after-school and enrichment programs but also the area schools from Martinsville to Blacksburg, Layman said.

She impressed Buffett so much with her teen-center proposal that Buffett kicked in an extra $50,000 this spring. After being told that she could request as much as $3 million from Buffett's foundation -- with the caveat being that all of it had to be matched with community funds -- Emanuelson asked for just $450,000. As she wrote in her proposal:

"We are not about building facilities; we are about building a legacy.

It would be our desire to ask for what we need and nothing more."

"I worried about sustainability," she recalled. "The last thing we needed was not to raise the matching funds." But thanks to 82 area individuals, businesses and foundations, the club raised the match quicker than any other Sunshine Foundation-funded group.

Emanuelson cried in an interview Thursday afternoon as she recounted some of her student success stories. There was the boy who asked her for a calculator one day because "he had so many numbers in his head" and has since gone on to excel in math. There was the girl she met on the day her mother was being evicted from their apartment. "She had all her stuff in a couple of trash bags and went on to graduate from Roanoke College, and she actually works for us now."

Not long ago, there was the construction manager who quit smoking after one of the center kids fussed at him and said, "That's gonna kill you, you know."

"We have to be that conduit for change, that conduit for graciousness to happen," said Emanuelson, who doesn't know where she'll work next.

"I'm not burned out," she insisted, even though she gave 42 fundraising pitches last year for United Way alone. "I think maybe I'm just full."