MELBOURNE, Fla. — Supporting young people in the wake a shooting that killed two teens is always challenging.

It becomes even more difficult when there isn’t the structure of a regular school week to fall back on.

That’s where organizations like the Boys & Girls Club of Central Florida in Melbourne said they can step in and provide extra support. They’re open every week, regardless of whether school is in session, so there’s always a safe place for kids to go.

“We’re just people who want to push kids to be great,” said Anwar Hunte, the services director for BGCC. “Whatever your level of greatness is, we want you to be great.”

Hunte has been with the Boys & Girls Club for nearly 15 years and split that time between the centers in Melbourne and Cocoa. He said hearing about the shooting death of 14-year-old Jeremiah Brown and a 16-year-old, whose bodies were discovered over the Christmas holiday weekend, was devastating.

“It’s horrifying because it’s like, why? And then you come to work and literally, I’m working with that same age group every day. It could’ve been any one of them,” Hunte said. “Just one simple wrong decision, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, stuff that we preach to them to be aware of, it could’ve been them.”

He said their organization is working on ways to better engage with the community and work with the schools so that they can work with more kids in the coming year.

“Of course we can’t stop all of it from happening, but the less stories like that, the less negative impact it has,” Hunte said. “I see parents worrying about that exact thing that happened over this weekend, happening to their kids. And that’s the main reason that they got them into the Boys & Girls Club.”

Hunte points to things like their growing maker space, where they offer the ability to work on barber skills and hair styling, to their burgeoning music studio, where kids can work on music and podcasting, as ways of creatively engaging kids.

“It’s not just some place that you come to drop your kids off so you can go do your thing. They’re actually going to learn, be nurtured and be safe and have fun here,” he said. “We want them to have so much fun, they don’t know that they’re learning.”