About BWB
What Is Our Mission All ABout?
Building With Baseball exists to support Dominican communities through the unifying power of baseball. But there’s more to our mission than that. Keep reading to see what we’re all about!
Sharing in the joy of our common pastime.
What makes this initiative unique is the way baseball brings us together across countries and cultures. That’s exactly what we’ve experienced on every trip: sharing in the joy of our common pastime with the wonderful people of the Dominican Republic.
The Glorious Details
In short: we take high school baseball players on trips to the dominican republic.
Now, Let’s Talk Details
In 2015, we organized the first of what has become an annual service and baseball trip to the Dominican Republic for the Wilson High School Baseball team (now renamed Jackson Reed High School) in Washington DC.
The team, together with a coaching staff and some parent volunteers, travel during the week of President’s Day, taking with them around 50 bags of donated baseball equipment and uniforms for the youth teams in the small town of Consuelo. We are welcomed by our baseball hosts and the Grey Sisters of the Immaculate Conception who have served in Consuelo since 1959, building schools, medical clinics, retirement homes, and more. We also partner with The Foundation for Peace who run an orphanage for disabled children and we support a missionary based in a remote village (Batey).
The Trip
After months of planning, fundraising, gathering and packing donations of baseball equipment, uniforms and supplies requested by our partners, the team is ready to fly, in more ways than one!
For six days, the team engages in pre-planned service projects that benefit from their youthful strength! They run baseball clinics for the children in the Bateyes and get to play games themselves with extraordinary Dominican baseball players.
Service projects have included laying a concrete floor for a chicken coop at the orphanage, painting walls and ceilings, gardening, digging a hole for a septic tank, helping with building a house, rebuilding a church wall, visiting with the children in the orphanage, and playing dominos with the seniors in the retirement home.
The Itinerary
The itinerary shows the good balance that has been reached over the years. One day the players are breaking out of their comfort zones serving and relating to new friends and community members, and the next they are playing ball in one of the pristine Dominican MLB Academies.
Fundraising
Over the years the players who attend and their families and friends back home have been able to raise a substantial amount of money to donate to our partners, and that amount increases each year. Over the years we have provided enough money to put two young women chosen by the Grey Sisters through medical school. They graduated last year and are now qualified doctors serving their community. We have also been able to make financial gifts to the orphanage, provide materials to build a backstop and repair baseball fields, and much more.
Each year the trip has improved and grown. In recent years we have been able to extend the trip to include up to eight baseball players from other DCPS schools.
Life-Changing
Everyone who has been on this trip has been changed in some way, with their own stories to tell. To experience a different culture where people have so little in material wealth and yet are so rich in other ways is humbling. All of us leave with a new perspective and not only a sense of how we can give back but how we can embrace and receive all that our friends in the DR have to give us.
A Letter From Our President:
Joy Carroll Wallis
As many of you know, for the last 10 years I have helped to lead a program that takes high school baseball players from Washington DC public schools to the Dominican Republic to play baseball and participate in community service projects. Some of you have generously donated when my sons Luke and Jack were attending the trip. Now they are grown up, and the trip continues.
Over those ten years, the lives of hundreds of students and coaches have been transformed by the extraordinary experience of building friendships with children and baseball players from a culture so very different from their own.
The BWB Team
Our Team is Passionate ABout playing for good
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Joy Carroll Wallis: President
In 1994, Joy was one of the first women to be ordained in the Church of England. She was the inspiration behind the hit BBC sitcom “The Vicar of Dibley” starring Dawn French, and the author of The Woman Behind the Collar: The Pioneering Journey of an Episcopal Priest. She currently serves on the staff team at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
As a parent, Joy was the commissioner of Little League Baseball, fundraiser, event planner, PTA President, President of the local High School Baseball Boosters, and organizer of high school baseball service trips to the Dominican Republic. Now, she is the Co-Founder and President of Building With Baseball Inc. Joy lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Jim Wallis. They have two adult sons, Luke and Jack.
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Robinson Matteo: Coach
Coach Matteo is a proud Woodrow Wilson High School alum, Class of 2012. During his senior year, he earned Washington Post First Team All-Met honors for his outstanding performance on the field. He went on to play four years of college baseball at Southern University while continuing his education.
Now serving as the Head Coach at Jackson-Reed High School, Coach Mateo is passionate about the game and even more dedicated to his role as a mentor. He loves coaching and takes pride in helping young men grow not just as athletes, but as successful, responsible individuals in life.
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Mark Whitener: Treasurer
Mark Whitener spent several decades as an antitrust lawyer in private and corporate practice and in government service, and now teaches at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. (See his professional biography here.) Mark's own baseball career was cut short by a lack of talent, but it revived when he began coaching his sons in little league (two of whom went on to play baseball in high school and college) and volunteering at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy.
Mark has supported youth baseball in D.C. by serving in leadership positions in several nonprofit organizations, including Northwest Washington Little League, the Wilson (now Jackson-Reed) High School Baseball Boosters, DC Batter Up!, and Building With Baseball.
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Andy Loomis: Secretary
Andy Loomis is a founding board member of Building with Baseball and has participated in baseball-oriented trips to the Dominican Republic since 2019. Over the past three decades, Andy has conducted analytic work and participated in service trips in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Andy has worked at the U.S. State Department and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence since 2009. Previously, he was active in international peace building efforts for several nongovernmental organizations based in Washington, DC, and taught international relations courses at several DC-area universities.
Andy earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Juniata College, Penn State University, Columbia University, and Georgetown University. Andy is married to Jenny Russell and enjoys two adult-aged children, Olivia and Jackson.
Want to Join Us in playing for good?
Make a tax-deductible donation to Building With Baseball today and support our mission to serve communities in extreme poverty through the unifying power of baseball.