Phrare Teinwan Brings Data-Driven Insights to BGCWPA as a Golub Capital Board Fellow

Since 1888, Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania (BGCWPA) has given generations of children and teens a safe place where they can learn, play and socialize after school. While that mission hasn’t changed, the organization has found new ways to bring its programs to more young people across the Pittsburgh region.

“How we reach kids has changed quite dramatically,” said Chris Watts, President and CEO of BGCWPA, one of the more than 5,500 local Boys & Girls Club affiliates across the United States.

“A lot of our growth has been by meeting our kids in the communities where they are, not having them meet us where we are,” he said.

The organization increasingly brings its programs beyond its Clubhouse doors, using mobile programs to reach new neighborhoods and partnering with school districts to provide after-school programming on site.

The approach has fueled rapid growth. Since Watts became President and CEO in 2022, the number of young people served annually has more than doubled, reaching more than 12,300 children and teens in 2025.

“Before, we weren’t meeting community expectations,” he said. “We’ve tried to embrace the community while continuing to offer wonderful after-school programs and expanding into other areas where we can be supportive.”

But that growth also brought new challenges: managing more programs, more data and a more complex operation.

Today, BGCWPA offers licensed childcare along with literacy, STEM enrichment, summer camp, and sports and recreation programs. Newer initiatives introduce teens to careers in fields such as digital media, sports management, architecture and law. A partnership with Per Scholas helps young adults prepare for careers in information technology.

“We’re not just a daycare or a safe place where kids go after school,” Watts said. “We’re really trying to drive their future success and help them get the tools, resources and support to get there.”

A Growing Nonprofit Faces a Strategic Challenge

As BGCWPA expanded, the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University launched the Golub Capital Board Fellows Program, which pairs MBA students with local nonprofits to serve as non-voting board members. The 18-month fellowship gives students hands-on experience in nonprofit governance while they complete a strategic project for the organization.

When Watts, a CMU alum, heard about the program at a university event, he was immediately interested. “We needed some smart thinking on big-picture things that my team and I don’t always have time to work through,” Watts said. “And personally, I’ve benefited from these types of programs professionally throughout my career.”

BGCWPA joined the inaugural Tepper School Board Fellows cohort in 2024. They were matched with Board Fellow Phrare Teinwan (MBA ’26). Born and raised in Thailand, Teinwan founded the country’s first remote-control aircraft club as an aerospace engineering student in college and later started the Thailand chapter of Women in Aviation International. “I’m really passionate about giving back to the community and driving the community forward, so when I saw the opportunity for the Golub Capital board fellowship, I was super excited to be a part of it,” she said.

Her project focused on one of the organization’s biggest challenges: As the Club grew, so did the amount of data it tracked – from membership and staffing to finances and program outcomes. But those numbers were scattered across different systems, making it difficult to get a clear picture of the Clubs’ overall performance.

Before each board meeting, Watts manually pulled data from multiple spreadsheets to piece together a snapshot of the organization’s finances, staffing and programs. Could she create a dashboard that gives the Clubs’ leaders a clear, complete view of its performance?

With a background in tech product management, Teinwan was well suited to the task. She built an organizational dashboard that gave leaders a single view of financial results, member enrollment, employee retention and program outcomes.

“It’s helping us identify the data that best reflects our mission and gives us a quick snapshot of the organization’s health,” Watts said.

The dashboard has also become a useful tool for communicating the Clubs’ performance to board members and other stakeholders. “This is phase one of a much bigger system that we want to build,” Watts said. “But even this prototype is helping my team quickly see where we’re succeeding and where we need to improve.”

Impact Beyond the Boardroom

Teinwan’s work with BGCWPA extended beyond data and dashboards. She also created “Pitch a Teen,” an event inspired by “Shark Tank” but with a twist: Five startup founders from CMU’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship presented their ideas -- not to investors, but to a panel of teen judges from BGCWPA.

Her reason for taking on the event in addition to her Board Fellows project was simple: “The more I worked with the Club leaders and staff, the more passionate I became about the difference they make in kids’ lives,” she said. “For the Clubs’ kids, the event helped them better understand business concepts, which could really inspire them to go to college, too.”

Even when away from campus, Teinwan stayed engaged with BGCWPA. During her summer internship with Boston Consulting Group in Bangkok, Thailand, she continued attending board meetings, despite the 11-hour time difference that required her to log on at 1 a.m., Watts said.

“She took the initiative, built relationships with leadership and staff members, and had the capabilities to do the work. That, frankly, made the process just a joy,” Watts said.

For Teinwan, attending board meetings with experienced nonprofit leaders offered new insights into collaboration and problem-solving – skills she will apply when she returns to BCG in Bangkok after graduation. “I was really inspired by their perspectives and questions – things I would not have thought of on my own,” she said.

Her fellowship also strengthened skills she will use in consulting, from coordinating projects to building support among stakeholders. “At BCG, I’ll need to talk to clients and to our internal team members to make things happen. And with my experiences as a Board Fellow, that will help a lot,” she said.

Watts said the Board Fellows Program can be especially valuable for nonprofits with ambitious goals but limited resources. “I would hope and expect that their experience would be similar to ours – that they will get a Board Fellow who helps take the organization to that next level.”