Conclusion of a four-part series. For previous installments, visit here.

Ikay Henry is sitting on a stage at the north end of the Taino Towers gym, leafing through a manila folder and smiling. He’s perusing 13-year-old Daquan Clarke’s math homework, several worksheets of word problems and complex fractions, adorned by near-perfect scores.

Henry has known Clarke most of his life. He coaches Clarke in Taino Towers’ embryonic youth basketball team; in the past, he’s worked at Clarke’s junior high school and at a YMCA where Clarke took acting classes. Both grew up at Taino Towers.

Henry is smiling because Clarke never used to earn grades like this; in fact, he never seemed to care about school at all.

“Just the growth that I see now is amazing,” says Henry, 28, a tall, broad man with a thin mustache.

Clarke acknowledges the transformation, too. “Before my grades were terrible,” he says at the end of practice. “Now it’s a B and up.” Clarke shrugs off the improvement, noting that he brought his homework to practice because he wants to show it to his parents later, in hopes of landing an improved Christmas bounty.

To Henry, though, that a kid would even think to show his coaches his homework means that, at least in one case, the basketball program—after a rocky start—is paying off.

It began in September after a particularly violent year at Taino Towers, a federally-subsidized apartment complex in East Harlem that houses about 3,000 residents and became the site of frequent fights between rival youth gangs over the spring and summer. Basketball, every Tuesday and Thursday in the gym beneath the complex, marks the start of a larger effort at Taino, to offer classes, leadership training and other sports like football, baseball and skiing. Some of the educational programs were supposed to begin by now in a new learning center that has been delayed, but is slated to open by the new year.

Team Taino also serves as a case study in the complexities of starting a program that targets at-risk kids in urban neighborhoods. As a holiday break approaches, its organizers are simultaneously reflecting on the impact they’ve already made and considering how to expand into the future.

“So far it has been able to maintain itself on the strength of the participants,” says William Thomas, a technology entrepreneur from Vermont who helped organize the team. “The long-term planning and financing will be a challenge.”

Its ambitious future plans will require money, but so far Team Taino hasn’t needed much. The gym is rent-free, reopened after being empty for years due to vandalism and misuse. Thomas and the team’s five volunteer coaches are unpaid. Basketball is a sport that requires only a hoop and a ball.

Still, for the team to survive, it needs to expand beyond Taino, the coaches say. That means tournaments, jerseys and transportation for a consistent roster of players.

“It’s about looking presentable and putting the resources together,” says Sherrod Kersey, 25, a coach from the Bronx who, like all the coaches, was a classmate of either Henry or his childhood friend Aris Martin, another team coach. “We need to look official. We go to tournaments and it’s embarrassing sometimes.”

White and gold jerseys are on the way, thanks to donations from Midtown Elevator Company and the Magic Johnson Foundation, housed in Taino Towers. Arco Management, the complex’s property manager, kicks in some money and several of Arco and Thomas’ corporate connections—the publisher of a high-end golf magazine plans to run a golf clinic; a scout from the New York Yankees has promised baseball training—have offered time and equipment.  But there’s no actual budget yet, says Thomas who, along with Taino Towers property manager Maria Cruz, handles most of the program’s financial and organizational responsibilities.

In all, the program so far has amassed “a couple thousand dollars” for an expanding roster of 40 kids aged 6 to 18 years, Thomas says, and organizers are actively looking for more money.

At a similar neighborhood program, the Children’s Aid Society’s East Harlem Center, the annual budget is about $90,000, about 80 percent of which comes from government grants, says the center’s director, David Giordano. Children’s Aid Society is larger than Taino, serving about 120 kids, but they are of comparable age and organized similarly, with younger kids there from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and the older kids from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Like Taino, it has a basketball gym—but kids have to enroll in educational and “personal development” programs before they can play. One difference, to date, is that $90,000 gives Giordano’s kids opportunities, from traveling the country for youth conferences to participating in UPS-sponsored driving safety initiatives.

Money helps. As a boy, Henry was selected for Merrill Lynch’s Scholarship Builders, which guaranteed full tuition to any child in his first-grade class later accepted by a college. Along the way, Henry met with personal mentors, visited far-flung locales on college tours and interned on Wall Street before studying business management at Hampton University in Virginia. About 15 of the 25 students in the program attended college and 20 graduated high school, according to a 1999 report by The New York Times. In his own work—at Taino, the YMCA or his own nonprofit, Harlem Mentors—Henry knows he will never have such substantial resources.

Some funding comes with a catch, Giordano says; most grants must be used in very specific ways, often restricting his autonomy. But without resources, there’s scant incentive for volunteers and participants to stay with the program through the inevitable tribulations. “It becomes a little limited, what you can ask of people and what you can’t,” says Giordano, who has worked with teens since 1980. “When you’re paying people, that adds another level.”

But Henry insists money isn’t everything. Merrill Lynch paid Henry’s college bills but, more importantly, his mentors taught “manners and how to act,” he says. “That’s what I’m trying to do here.”

His childhood friend, Aris Martin, wasn’t involved with Scholarship Builders but did attend prestigious Rice High School along with Henry. Martin didn’t enjoy the same perks and didn’t go on to a university. However, he says what he’s learned from his mistakes—he’s now working for Arco Management and, after some initial doubts, is perhaps the most omnipresent and enthusiastic of the team’s coaches—is just as valuable to teens.

“I see them doing better than me,” he says.

There is no magic formula for starting a youth program—at a basic level, the youth workers must relate to the kids. It’s unclear whether Team Taino will do enough to have a long-term effect on children, but perhaps its most valuable capital is the goodwill building between its coaches and players.

“I see them on a daily basis so they get more out of it,” says Martin, who lives at Taino. “When they see me in the streets they pick their head up.”

And that’s what Team Taino is banking on, Thomas says. “You can have all the money in the world; if you don’t have the right people, the money won’t be utilized in the right way.” Though even with the right people, the children of East Harlem face many pitfalls.

Both Giordano and Taino Towers’ basketball coaches have found the distractions of the digital age a barrier in reaching teens. “The attention span is very small,” says Norman Anderson, a 28-year-old coach from Brooklyn. “You have to keep on reminding them and reminding them until it eventually sticks.”

On cue, Anderson stops to yell at Clarke, who tried unsuccessfully to outmaneuver an opponent in a drill, took a bad shot and missed. “If you had used the move we just taught you, you would’ve scored!” Anderson reminds him loudly. Clarke nods sheepishly.

Giordano blames the recession, which shuttered or cut back many local youth programs, for an increase in teen crime at housing projects like Taino Towers. As of mid-December, the 25th police precinct, which includes Taino Towers, has seen an increase from last year in murders and assaults and is on pace for an increase in robberies.

In school District 4, which includes East Harlem and parts of the Upper East Side, 67 percent of students graduate, compared to 74 percent statewide and 59 percent citywide.  In 2008, 35.6 percent of local families with children under 18 were living below the poverty line. It’s under those conditions when gangs become most attractive, Giordano says.

“That coach in the street they grew up with can give them something, but not everything,” Giordano says. From the child’s perspective, “if I’m not finding the security in a space or program that’s open, I find it in a crew,” Giordano continues. “There’s hierarchy and structure.”

At Taino Towers, structure developed slowly for the basketball team. Early practices suffered because its coaches didn’t show up consistently, because drills were less organized, and because misbehaving kids were allowed to disrupt practices. At one point, a tiff between a player and a coach escalated to a fight involving the player and a relative. That incident served as a wake-up call for the coaches.

Since then, the coaches have “weeded out the bad seeds,” as Kersey puts it, and focused on organizing a team, rather than wrangling disorganized loiterers looking for a pick-up game.

“You got to crawl before you can walk,” says Devin Johnson, an 18-year-old who had the potential to be one of Kersey’s “bad seeds,” but now attends every practice and helps coach the younger players. Johnson scored a team-high 18 points in Team Taino’s first game at a midtown YMCA recreation league. “At first it wasn’t really organized, but now everyone knows how to play with each other.”

By the new year, Thomas vows,  a learning center and lounge will open above the Taino Towers gym, a place for team members to hang out after practice and a site for educational programs and video game tournaments. A teen theater production, run out of Taino Towers’ Red Carpet Theater, is slated to start by the end of January. In February, the teens will go on a ski trip and, in the spring, have a choice of baseball, golf and football clinics. A potential partnership with the Ron Brown Scholar Program would provide various classes, including leadership training that features Skype conferences with business leaders. These, however, still remain plans. And Cruz, the property manager, has even more planned. During a recent trip to her native Puerto Rico, she discussed bringing Team Taino down to play in a tournament there.

Meanwhile, architects have completed blueprints for a new $3 million fitness center at Taino, another space for youth programs, built around the complex’s pool. Eventually, Cruz hopes Taino Towers can be become a hub for teens in East Harlem.

Henry and his fellow basketball coaches are thinking more short-term. They want to enter Team Taino in upcoming basketball tournaments in the city. Their model is the Amateur Athletic Union, the top level of non-scholastic basketball; New York City boasts some of the best AAU teams in the nation. Besides basketball, Henry would like every Taino teen to have a mentor, just as he did. Martin wants to start a financial literacy course.

Whatever the future holds for Team Taino, its players don’t seem to think much beyond each Tuesday or Thursday, when they can play basketball with their friends and the worst consequences for a bad decision are running extra laps around the gym or watching an opponent put the ball through the net.

After all, it’s simple, Daquan Clarke says: “Everybody in this neighborhood likes basketball.”

For more information on Team Taino, visit www.tainoyouth.com or e-mail info@tainoyouth.com. For more information on Harlem Mentors, contact Ikay Henry at 347-756-0742 or visit www.harlem-mentors.org.