The Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester and Martin Richard Foundation will break ground a new facility set to serve thousands more kids in the neighborhood on Thursday.

“We’ll be able to serve thousands of more children,” Bob Scannell, President and CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester, said of the facility. “Currently we serve about 4,000 children a year, of all ages, and this will easily help us to double that membership. And that’s being conservative once the doors are open.”

The new FieldHouse+ facility, to be located at 315 Mt. Vernon St. in Dorchester, is planned to be a 75,000 square-foot, athletic and recreational building serving kids in the neighborhood.

The groundbreaking is set for 11 a.m. on Thursday, and construction will begin in May, with the goal of opening the facility in late 2026, Scannell said.

The center, joining three other Boys and Girls Clubs locations in Dorchester, is planned to include indoor turf field, teaching kitchen, community theatre, indoor and outdoor courts, roof garden, music studio, and more, the organization said.

Scannell noted there is a “huge need for the youth of Dorchester.”

“We’re literally steps away from two Boston Public Schools, the Ruth Batson School and the Paul Dever School, both of them on Mount Vernon Street, right next to the location where we’ll be building the center,” said Scannell. “And there’s a 1000 students there who will have full access to it during the school day, and then they’ll all become members free of charge to all of our Boys and Girls Clubs.”

The Boston School Committee voted to close the Dever School, along with several other BPS schools, at the end of the 2025-26 school year during a March meeting.

The organization has raised $43 million, Scannell said, with a goal of $70 million. The campaign kicked off with a $10 million gift from philanthropist Rob Hale in 2024.

Scannell noted as the “cost of everything just keeps going up,” the organization is looking to “get in the ground and get this thing moving and get it built as soon as we possibly can.”

“We realize a project like this, it’s just so enormous in scope,” said Scannell. “It really required pulling together the two organizations to get this done. And we’re certainly off and running.”

A new field house for the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester is set to break ground on Thursday. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)