“What Hand do you Put the Glove on?”

How Roberto’s Kids was Born ​

Sometime in the early 90s, Steve Pindar, the founder of our grantee organization, Roberto’s Kids, found himself playing baseball with his youngest son in the Dominican Republic. The apartment they were staying in had some baseball equipment laying around; a bat, glove, and ball. The pair went out to the street to play catch, a normal occurrence in their baseball-heavy-household. 

What they didn’t necessarily expect was an audience. A young local approached them and joined in on their game. “He knew exactly what he was doing”, Pindar says. They asked if he wanted to use a glove, and his eyes lit up. His first question was which hand the glove went on. 

“It’s hard to verbalize the look on the kids face.” Pindar recalls “You’d have thought you’d given him the greatest gift in the world, and maybe we had.”

This, and many other stories like it, are what drove Steve Pindar to create Roberto’s Kids, a non profit working to expand their efforts beyond the work of delivering lightly used baseball equipment to children in vulnerable parts of the world and through to greater, expansive social change.

For several years, they were just a family doing a project. Granted, a project that was responsible for two-thirds of a ton of baseball equipment being delivered globally each year. Steve’s family thought this, however, was only the tip of the iceberg. 

That provincial iceberg, in fact, has now seen 25 tons of equipment through to various places all over the world, each year. 

If you’re inspired by Steve’s story, as we are, you can read more about it in the Grantee tab of our website and on our social media platforms. Thank you, Steve and Roberto’s Kids for your work, heart, candor, and inspiration.