The Boys and Girls Clubs of Winnipeg is very excited to be hosting their first ever wedding at one of their Clubs! Jenny Isla and Cole Berens will be taking their vows at the Gilbert Park Club on Saturday, April 23, 2016.

The Gilbert Park Club was where Jenny and Cole first met in 2011 as members and both volunteering for Boys and Girls Clubs of Winnipeg as teen mentors. In 2012, they began dating and both went on to enroll in our Youth Recreation Activity Worker Program through Red River College – Jenny in 2014 and Cole in 2015. On January 8, 2016 Cole proposed to Jenny at the Gilbert Park Club where it all began!

“We decided to get married at Gilbert Park because we never had such an amazing support system to better our lives,” says Jenny Isla, “It is a love story that we can tell our future kids, our parents and families, or even the kids that we work with. We can say ‘we met at the Club, we got engaged at the Club and got married at Club’ (Nothing gets better than that!) Why not get married where we first started off?”

In addition to their volunteer work as teen mentors and their participation in the Youth Recreation Activity Worker Program, Jenny and Cole were involved with Boys and Girls Clubs of Winnipeg’s PowerUp!, Boys Night Out, and Community School Investigators (CSI) programs.

“The Boys and Girls Club did almost everything to help us be successful. If it wasn’t for them we would have never been to college,” says Jenny Isla, “Cole and I worked very hard at PowerUp! to earn bursaries and I paid for my second year of college with those. We are so thankful and blessed to have the Boys and Girls Club in our lives. The staff at Gilbert Park taught us to be positive, kind and caring role models.”

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Winnipeg is truly grateful to be such a big part of this love story, and to see firsthand how impactful our Clubs and programs have been in just these two young people’s lives.