Kevin Durant’s right-hand man boosts the Union’s charitable work in Chester
“I never had somebody that just put their arm around me and was like ... 'Let me show you the way,'" Rich Kleiman told students in a mentorship program run by the Union. Now he can be that role model.
Rich Kleiman knows there can be skepticism at times when sports teams make big claims about their charity work. Especially when those teams haven’t fulfilled past promises to their communities.
The longtime manager of NBA star Kevin Durant — also known as Union and Gotham FC part-owner Kevin Durant — knows some of the history between the Union and Chester. Back in 2008, when the team got $87 million in public funding to build the stadium now called Subaru Park, it came with plans to build housing, retail space including a supermarket, office space, and a 200,000-square-foot convention center.
Almost none of that ever happened. The old Chester Power Station was renovated into offices, the Union turned an adjacent building into their practice facility, and they built two practice fields on vacant space. Now they’ve embarked on building five more fields and a building that will house the team’s youth academy, reserve team, and a multi-sports complex the public can rent.
The housing, supermarket, other retail space, and convention center are only a past dream now.
What did happen was a change in focus for the Union after Tim McDermott became the team’s president. In recent years, the team has put its effort and money into funding a soccer team at Chester High School, building small soccer facilities around the region, and a mentorship program for kids called the iAM Project.
The last of those is the team’s newest program, run in conjunction with the Chester Charter Scholars Academy with funding support from some big local companies: BIMBO Bakeries (the Union’s jersey sponsor), Lincoln Financial Group, the Global Neurosciences Institute, and Neumann University. Durant’s charity foundation is also involved.
» READ MORE: Kevin Durant bought an ownership stake in the Union in 2020
The project’s long-term goal is for the companies involved to hire the kids involved. Along the way, there are meant to be opportunities for internships in high school, business connections in college.
“The iAM Project leverages a network of inspirational speakers, academic and professional mentors, innovative links to industry, universities and internship providers to foster the knowledge, skills and interests that will afford our scholars a better future and a brighter hope,” the project’s website says in its introduction.
And it concludes: “We ask all our partners to guarantee a job interview to our alumni upon graduation from university, trade school or completion of their apprenticeship.”
Kleiman is one of a lot of people involved with the project who want it to work. When he came to Neumann earlier this month to speak to the students, he had their attention.
“I never had somebody that just put their arm around me and was like, ‘Rich, I got you. Let me show you the way,’” he said.
Now Kleiman has the opportunity to help the Union do that for children in Chester.
» READ MORE: The Union will move their academy from Wayne to Chester and build a new soccer complex next to Subaru Park
“99.999% of these kids don’t even get a chance, they don’t even get to see a glimmer of light, and it’s already written,” Kleiman told The Inquirer in a subsequent interview.
“To be able to un-write that and to give people an opportunity really is as motivating for me as anything that I do,” he said “There’s elite, great minds — all these young boys and girls in these communities that are the next great innovators, that could be helping our world, that don’t even get an iota of a chance. Don’t get any funding, don’t get any investment, don’t get money from venture capital.”
There’s a long way to go with the iAM Project, but if it succeeds it could pay big dividends. Kleiman believes it will succeed.
“People in general in underserved communities should be skeptical, because they’ve been promised things over and over and over again, and institutionally have been let down,” he said. “So I get it. But at the same time, I think that you can only really pay attention to what you’re seeing in front of you, and the kind of impact that you feel when you’re in front of these people in the community. And all I have felt has been a great sense of [a] kind of reward from our conversations, and understanding that there is a desire on behalf of the organization to do for the community.”