In contrast to the divisiveness and cynicism currently fueling our national discourse, Starbucks created "Upstanders," its first original content series, which aims to inspire Americans to engage in acts of compassion, citizenship and civility. “Upstanders” features ten stories, each told in written, video and podcast form, about ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities. The series is written and produced by Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and ceo, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Starbucks executive producer and a former senior editor of&nbsp;The Washington Post.&nbsp;

core/paragraph

core-embed/youtube

Makayla George went on her first college tour when she was in the eighth grade. She took the requisite entrance tests on time. And in the fall of 2015, when she was a senior in high school, she applied to 13 colleges.

Then she spent weeks agonizing over which one to choose.

George, a bubbly, curly-haired sports fanatic, revealed her choice on “Decision Day,” a school-wide assembly in May during which seniors stand up, walk onto a stage, and announce the college they will be attending.

Clad in a yellow t-shirt with the words “ACCEPTED” on the front, she told the crowd, “I will be attending Eastern Michigan University.” Applause echoed across the gymnasium.

Among her graduating class, her experience was far from unique. Most of her classmates applied to multiple colleges – one of them sent out 20 applications – and most got into their top choice. All told, 90 percent of her class will pursue some form of higher education.

Those stats sound like the stuff of an elite prep school, not the public high school in the seat of one of the poorest counties in Michigan, where 95 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

But something fascinating has occurred in the village of Baldwin.

It wasn’t long ago that most of Baldwin’s young people would hang around the blighted Rust Belt community after they graduated from high school, getting by on income from odd jobs or applying to become a guard at the privately run prison that is the area’s principal employer. In a good year, 30 percent of graduates would head off to undertake some form of further schooling, but many returned after a year or two, unable to afford the cost of attendance. More young people wound up on public assistance within four years of leaving high school than earned college diplomas.

“Baldwin has a long history of generational poverty,” says Randy Howes, who spent seven years as the superintendent of the school system in Baldwin. “They matriculated into what had been traditional within the families, which was a welfare existence.”

In 2005, Howes and other Baldwin leaders learned about a plan that had been unveiled in the Michigan city of Kalamazoo to offer every high school graduate a full scholarship to attend any public college in the state. The program, called the Kalamazoo Promise, was underwritten by a group of anonymous donors.

“If Kalamazoo could find an angel to subsidize a promise, why couldn’t we do that in Baldwin?” recalls Ellen Kerans, a retired teacher who moved to the village 12 years ago and served as a volunteer tutor in the schools.

Unlike Kalamazoo, Baldwin didn’t have any local prospective angels – no big businesses, no deep-pocketed philanthropists. So Kerans, Howes, and a few others joined forces and wrote up proposals addressed to large corporations and foundations elsewhere in the state. They mailed letters to anyone they thought might be willing to donate.

They received a few positive responses. By then, however, it was the summer of 2007. Not long after, the mortgage bubble burst and U.S. stock markets crashed.

“They wrote us back saying they were not a bit interested anymore,” Kerans says. “We were devastated.”

Kerans, Howes, and the others licked their wounds, but not for long.

“These kids needed us,” she says. “We weren’t going to give up.”

As village leaders regrouped, they got a bit of good news. Rick Simonson, a Baldwin native who chaired President Gerald Ford’s election campaign in Michigan and later served as a legislative staffer and lobbyist in Michigan, told them about a law that the legislature had just passed aimed at creating 10 “promise zones” in the state to offer Kalamazoo-like scholarships. If communities raised sufficient seed funds, they would be allowed to sustain the scholarships by keeping a portion of annual property tax revenues that they would otherwise have to pass on to the state.

The Baldwin leaders realized they would have to raise just a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the $3 million they had thought they needed. But even that sum seemed insurmountable. Nobody in Baldwin and surrounding Lake County had any money to spare lying around. Everyone appeared to be living paycheck to paycheck, or on welfare.

Unwilling to give up, Kerans began to knock on doors. Her neighbors. Churches. The Rotary Club. The police station and the fire station.

“We had some grandparents who said, ‘I can only give $20 a month. Is that okay?’” she says. “And we said, ‘That’s more that we could expect.’”

A roadside barbecue joint put out a collection jar. It raised $500.

Kerans and Simonson met with every teacher and employee of the school system. They walked out with $17,500 in pledges. Even the custodial staff contributed.

“It was amazing,” she remembers. “Everyone wanted our students to have an opportunity that wasn’t given to them.”

People who had grown up in Baldwin, but were no longer living there, pitched in, too. Village leaders sent letters to every former resident for whom they could track down an address. Checks arrived from across the country.

Many in Baldwin believe the collective generosity is the result of strong community spirit and deep civic engagement. But they maintain that another, perhaps surprising characteristic of their village deserves the most credit: its racial diversity.

Baldwin is on the western side of lower Michigan, about halfway between Grand Rapids and Traverse City. That part of the state is predominantly white, save for Baldwin, whose school district also includes the neighboring hamlet of Idlewild. The district’s population is almost evenly divided between white and black residents.

Before the Civil War, Idlewild was one of the northernmost stops on the Underground Railroad. In the Jim Crow era, wealthy blacks from Detroit and Chicago, including prominent entertainers such as Nat King Cole, who faced discrimination at white-run vacation resorts, spent their summer holidays around the lake in Idlewild.

In the 1960s, schools in the area were integrated with little of the strife that ripped apart other communities, in large part because the high school’s sports teams faced virulent racism when they traveled to compete in nearby towns, most of which were all white. Epithets were shouted from the stands. Nooses were tied to football goalposts. Opposing players spat in their hands before offering them to Baldwin kids for post-game high fives.

“Those things brought us closer together,” says Deborah Smith-Olson, the chief executive of the Lake-Osceola State Bank, who grew up in Baldwin and now serves as the chair of the board of the Baldwin Promise Authority. “They didn’t do it to our black friends. They did it to all of us.”

The racial animosity from other communities, which continues to this day, according to current students, has created a distinctive environment in Baldwin’s schools. Black and white students sit together in classrooms and at lunch tables, not in separate groups. They socialize together and consider each other the best of friends.

Smith-Olson believes that when alumni were solicited to support the scholarship fund, those memories led them to dig deep into their wallets. “There was a positive association for those who went to school here,” she says.

Within a year – faster than anyone involved had expected – Baldwin had raised enough money to inaugurate the scholarship program.

The Baldwin Promise is a remarkable expression of a small town’s desire to create a better future for its young people. Although there are promise scholarships in several communities around the nation, Baldwin was the first place to raise the seed funds through grassroots contributions.

High school graduates receive a $5,000-a-year scholarship for four years to attend any public college or university in Michigan. To qualify for the full amount, students have to have spent all of their high school years at Baldwin High.

The Promise kicks in only after students have exhausted other forms of financial aid, such as Pell Grants and state funding. But for most graduates, the $5,000 helps them make up the difference to pay for a four-year university.

Makayla George, the woman who was admitted to 13 schools, said she likely would have attended a two-year community college or a trade school if she didn’t have the Promise. “I wouldn’t have been able to pay for four years,” she says.

Scholarship money is just one ingredient in the secret sauce that has transformed Baldwin. The Promise has radically reoriented the village’s overall attitude toward education. At the elementary school, a banner in the hallway proclaims, “College Begins in Kindergarten.” It is bordered with each child’s hand-drawn face, adorned with a blue commencement cap.

In the first grade, children are asked what they want to be when they grow up, and teachers steer the discussion to the importance of college to achieve those dreams. When students reach the fifth grade, they are taken on a field trip to a college in central Michigan.

“Twenty years ago, you would hear first-graders say, ‘I want to be just like my dad,’ who was on welfare and didn’t work,” says Judith Eversole, who spent 24 years on the town’s school board. “Now they say, ‘I want to be a doctor.’”

In high school, the focus on higher education intensifies. Ayana Richardson, the director of the College Access Center, leads the charge from a cinder-block-walled room painted blue and maize – the colors of her alma mater, the University of Michigan – and adorned with photos of universities and motivational messages about higher education. “You have what it takes to get into college!” proclaims one.

Richardson, who combines the peppiness of a cheerleader with the no-excuses mentality of a hard-nosed coach, has a job that was created – and is partly funded – by the Promise program. It is her unflagging drive to take students on campus visits, get them to take their aptitude tests on time, apply to a range of schools, and craft their admissions essays with care that is as crucial to the increase in the higher education matriculation rate as the $5,000 annual scholarships.

During a week of last year’s fall break, she came to work every day. She summoned several seniors at 7:45 a.m. to prepare for tests and fill out applications before admissions deadlines.

“Ayana works with every student,” says Kerans. “She won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She’ll text them to remind them that applications are due. She’ll stay in touch with them when they get to college and help them if they have problems.”

For every dollar the Baldwin Promise program devotes to scholarships, it spends two on preparation efforts. “The readiness piece is key,” Kerans says.

Richardson, who gets as excited at the arrival of each acceptance letter as the recipient, recognizes that most of her students don’t have parents who have filled out college applications or navigated the financial aid process. “I’ve told them that I’m there for them, at every step of the way,” she says. “If you want to get kids to college, you can’t just offer them money.”

The scholarships and Richardson’s coaching have fostered a new attitude toward studying among students. Instead of trying to skate by just doing the bare minimum, they are actively engaged in the classroom. “I have students who come in and say, ‘I need to get this grade because I want to go to this school,’” she says. “Students are more focused on their academic performance.”

That’s fueled a healthy competition the village previously saw only on the athletic fields. In 2015, the graduating class completed about 100 college applications. In 2016, the number jumped to 150.

Next year’s class, Richardson says, already has pledged to exceed that total.

Ten of the 150 applications that the Class of 2016 submitted were sent by Da’Ron Copeland. Asked to list them, he struggles to remember every institution, even though he was accepted by all 10. But what matters now is the one he is attending: Michigan State University.

“I’ve always wanted to be there. I’ve idolized the university. But I wasn’t really sure if I’d be able to do that coming from where I did,” he says.

Neither of his parents went to college, and he knew his family wouldn’t be able to afford to send him, either. His grades were good, and he was a decent athlete, but he wasn’t good enough in the classroom or on the court to get a full scholarship. And he didn’t want to spend years paying off large student loans.

“Without the Promise, there’s no way I’d be attending State,” he says.

Richardson arrived in Baldwin when Copeland was in the eighth grade. She took him and his classmates on a tour of Central Michigan University. It was the first time he had been on a college campus, and it inspired him to think about life beyond high school – and beyond Baldwin. He devoted more energy to academics, and heeded Richardson’s reminders to fill out every form on time.

“Before, a lot of us thought, ‘Maybe I can go to college one day,’” he says. “It’s a mindset now. We know it’s attainable.”

Upstanders: Scholarships for Every Student - Starbucks Stories

Stories to inspire and nurture the human spirit

Starbucks Stories

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2019/01/Photo_TBD-320x411_1-1.jpg

Starbucks Corporation

Upstanders: Scholarships for Every Student

A Starbucks Original Series: In Baldwin, Michigan, college wasn’t in the cards for most high-school graduates — until residents did something remarkable: They banded together and raised enough money to provide every student with a scholarship.

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2016/09/20160812upstanders_baldwin_004-1024x668.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2016/upstanders-scholarships-for-every-student/

twitter:card

twitter:description

twitter:image

twitter:title

In contrast to the divisiveness and cynicism currently fueling our national discourse, Starbucks created&nbsp;"Upstanders," its first original content series, which aims to inspire Americans to engage in acts of compassion, citizenship and civility. “Upstanders” features ten stories, each told in written, video and podcast form, about ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities. The series is written and produced by Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and ceo, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Starbucks executive producer and a former senior editor of The Washington Post.&nbsp;

As the morning sun illuminated his kitchen, Steve Stone poured himself a cup of coffee and picked up the local newspaper. Reading it gave him a chance to cool off after riding his bike, and the articles usually provided him with a thought or two to incorporate into the sermon he would deliver later that Sunday morning at Heartsong Church, the United Methodist congregation he had started 19 years ago in Cordova, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis.

Stone’s eyes settled on a headline at the bottom of the front page: Muslims buy land for hub in Cordova.

The paragraphs underneath said that the Memphis Islamic Center was planning to build a mosque and “a sprawling community center” in his community.

That’s interesting, he thought. I didn’t realize there were that many Muslims in Memphis.

He flipped a few pages to keep reading, and learned that the Islamic center had purchased 30 acres. Then he saw where: near the intersection of Humphrey and Houston Levee roads.

Stone closed his eyes. His stomach turned queasy.&nbsp;

The mosque would be directly across the street from his church.

Stone went to Heartsong and sat in his office to think.

Lord, he prayed, what are we supposed to do?

The next day, he called up a local company that manufactures custom-made signs and placed an order for a six-foot-wide, bright-red vinyl banner. When it arrived two days later, he affixed it on a patch of grass on his side of Humphrey Road, in full view of every passing vehicle.

'Heartsong Church welcomes Memphis Islamic Center to the neighborhood.'

core/heading

Sitting in his office, Stone had recalled the biblical parable Jesus told about the Good Samaritan: A traveler, beaten and left for dead, lay by the side of the road, ignored by passersby. The one person who finally stopped to help was a Samaritan, a member of a despised religious group. As Stone ruminated on this love-­‐thy-­‐neighbor tale that challenged preconceived notions, he hit himself on the forehead.

We’ve got to find a way to love these people, he thought.

Leaders of the booming Muslim community in Memphis wanted a spacious place where they could gather not just to worship – there were other mosques in the region for that – but to host weddings and throw parties, to gather on holidays and relax on weekends, to house a day care center for children and activities for the elderly. “A place to pray and play,” said Bashar Shala, the 49-year-old cardiologist who is the chairman of the board of trustees for the Islamic center.

They had put a bid on a parcel a few months earlier, but were turned down when the owner learned the prospective purchaser was an

Islamic organization. Shala recalls hearing the bad news from his real estate agent, who’d been told, “Well, this is not for sale anymore.”

He and other board members weren’t surprised. They had been following with increasing alarm the opposition to mosque construction projects in other cities in Tennessee, near Ground Zero, and elsewhere in the country. “We were nervous,” he remembers. “Very nervous.”

It pained him to feel that way. A native of Aleppo, Syria – an ancient city on the Mediterranean that has been eviscerated by civil war

– he wished more of his fellow Americans would see beyond the stereotypes of Muslim Americans. The Memphis Islamic Center counts among its members doctors and lawyers, business owners and students. And those are just the women.

The sermons at the main weekly prayers on Friday afternoons often focus on messages of tolerance and interfaith harmony. At one of them earlier this year, Shala told the story of what happened when the Prophet Muhammad stood up, as a sign of respect, for a passing funeral procession.

“It’s a Jew,” one man told Muhammad, imploring him to sit back down.

“Was he not a human?” Muhammad responded.

Clad in a gold-fringed black robe and standing at a wooden pulpit, Shala employed the Islamic parable to drive home his message about peaceful coexistence. “In today’s world, when Islam is being misinterpreted by Muslims, we have to go back to the basics – to what God admonishes us in the Koran to do: To be good to those around you – that’s what Allah wants us to do.”

But as he and his board searched for land, he figured most Memphis residents didn’t expect those sorts of messages to echo inside the walls of the mosque they wanted to build. When they finally found what seemed like the perfect plot in Cordova – 30 rolling acres with an idyllic pond – he was far from relieved. The land abutted Houston Levee Road, which many in the town have dubbed “church road” because of the number of Christian houses of worship that line it.

“Memphis is the buckle of the Bible Belt,” he said. “And here we were, the Muslims, coming in to establish a community worship center right in the middle of church street.”

Soon after they acquired the property and the story hit the newspaper, Shala drove over to see his purchase. That’s when he spied the banner on Heartsong’s side lawn.

“The nervousness, much of it was taken care of,” he said. “We thought we’d have to work hard to show that we’re peaceful Muslims, that we’re not terrorists, that we’re just normal people.”

The fear that dissipated among the Muslims building the Islamic center traveled across the street, to some members of Stone’s congregation at Heartsong, a music-­‐themed congregation he’d founded as a place for people who don’t like going to church. The interior is modern and welcoming, with inspirational wall art and a large water fountain. He often describes his flock as a “grateful, recovering, Jesus-following tribe of knot heads, hotheads, potheads, sots and assorted nuts.”

“If you don’t fit in those categories, you’re in denial,” says Stone, a cheerful man with graying hair who wears a cross-shaped earring and rainbow-framed sunglasses. “And we’ll take you, too.”

Among the initial skeptics was Mark Sharpe, a painting contractor who had been a member of the church for 10 years.

“I was very uncomfortable,” he said. “I didn't like it at all.” Sharpe and his wife, Karen, thought about leaving Heartsong.

Before he did, however, he decided to talk to Stone.

“What are we doing?” he asked. “What is going on here?”

Stone acknowledged that he had known little about Islam before erecting the banner. He knew that one man he worked out with at his local gym was a Muslim, but they never talked about religion. “I was totally ignorant,” Stone recalled. “When I would watch the news, I saw turmoil and strife” in Muslim countries, “and I didn't know anything else.”

Stone told Sharpe about the members of the Islamic center he had met, and explained that his Christian faith – not a deep study of Islam -­‐ was at the root of his decision to welcome their new neighbors. Stone urged Sharpe to read the first four books of the New Testament. “If there’s anything we’re doing that doesn’t line up with the Gospels, then you come back and let me know.”

“I figured out it was a sickness in me,” he said, tearing up as he recounted his antipathy toward Muslims. “In a sense, I was the problem. What was going on with the world today, I was the problem.”

He and his wife told Stone they would be staying at Heartsong. But others in the pastor’s flock were not persuaded. Although he individually counseled everyone who was upset, about 20 members of his 800-strong congregation, including some in key leadership&nbsp; positions, wound up leaving the church.

“We hated to see them go, but at the same time, we realized that if that’s what they really believe, if that’s how they really felt, then they weren’t meant to be part of Heartsong,” he said. “We were okay with them finding another place that was more like their hearts and minds.”

The following year, Shala and other leaders of the Islamic center found themselves racing the calendar. Their first building, which would house the mosque, was under construction. But they weren’t sure it would be completed by the start of the holy month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast during daylight hours and mosques hold special nighttime prayers.

“We were wondering if we could use a small room in your building for our prayers,” Shala asked. “Just for a few nights until our building is done. We’ll be glad to pay you.”

Stone asked Shala how many people he wanted to bring over. Maybe 100. Maybe 200. He wasn’t sure.

The only room big enough to hold them all was the main sanctuary hall, where a large cross, encircled by a heart, adorns the wall. Stone told Shala they could use it.

“But there’s just one thing,” he added. “You can’t pay us. We’re not going to accept any money. We’re neighbors.”

The two men embraced, and both began to cry.

As he was leaving, Shala told Stone that he would be praying that his building would be completed in time. He said he didn’t want to cause Heartsong any trouble.

“Okay, you pray that way,” Stone said. “I’m going to pray a competing prayer. I’m gonna pray that you have to come in, at least for a few days, because I think that would be great for our people and it would be great for your people.”

In the end, Stone’s prayer was answered, and then some: Members of the Islamic center spent the entire month of Ramadan at Heartsong.

Heartsong members came to their church every night at 7 p.m. to greet their Muslim neighbors. “We wanted it to feel like home for them,” Stone said.

On the last night of Ramadan, Yasir Qadhi, a Muslim scholar who was leading the prayer service, called Stone to the front of the room and then addressed the congregation. “I know you have heard bad things about Christian people, just like Christian people have heard bad things about Muslim people,” Qadhi said. “But these are what real Christians are like, and they’ve gotten to see what real Muslims are like.”

That Ramadan cemented an enduring friendship. Since then, the two congregations have fed the homeless together and undertaken other joint community service projects. They hold interfaith discussions.

Every year around the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, they hold a joint blood drive. Two months later, they celebrate Thanksgiving together at Heartsong. And each spring, the Islamic center hosts a lively picnic featuring barbecue brisket sandwiches, bounce houses for children, and tables where the neighbors can catch up on each other’s lives and share a laugh.

The events have brought together people who live on the same block or have children in the same class at school but have never talked about religion. Conversations sometimes begin with, “I didn’t know you were a Muslim” and “I didn’t know you worship at Heartsong.”

Stone and Shala occasionally speak at Memphis-area schools and community centers. When they do, they’re always asked if anyone from Heartsong has converted to Islam, or anyone from the Memphis Islamic Center has become a Christian. “No,” says Shala. “But we’ve all become stronger in our own faith.”

The friendship has led journalists from Muslim countries to visit and share the sort of story about Muslims in America that rarely gets told. That publicity, in turn, has led to letters and emails from around the world, and even a late-night phone call to Stone from a man named Kanj in Pakistan, who was sitting with a group of friends when they heard a radio report about what had occurred in Memphis during Ramadan.

“Doctor Stone, we know you’re not God, but when you were talking, we felt it was God talking to us,” the man said. “After we heard what you did, one of the men with me said, ‘How can we hate these people? How can we kill these people? They love us.’”

Another man, Kanj told Stone, got up and left as soon as he had heard the broadcast. He returned 45 minutes later and announced that he had cleaned the small church in their village, where the Christian minority is frequently persecuted. “For the rest of our lives,” Kanj promised, “we’re going to take care of that church.”

Inspired by the response their relationship has elicited, Stone and Shala want to make Humphrey Road into a destination to celebrate religious tolerance and camaraderie. Members of both congregations have developed plans to construct a large park on the two sides of the road, connected by a bridge that celebrates friendship. Their ambition is to create a videoconferencing center where people from around the world can interact with visitors to the park. Stone envisions serious discussions about subjects such as reducing religious hatred, but also lighthearted events: He’d like people from across the globe to participate in Heartsong's exercise dance classes.

Stone smiles as he ponders all that has resulted from his simple act of placing a welcome sign in front of his church.

“I just expected to be nice to some new people who were moving in, and we’d be cordial neighbors,” he said. “Now my life is so very changed by these friendships and relationships. I’ve been to weddings and parties that I didn’t even know existed. I've been part of events with people that I never knew.”

“It’s an amazing friendship,” he said, “that I can’t imagine having missed out on.”

Memphis Tennessee News - August 23, 2010

A Starbucks Original Series: When an Islamic center purchased a plot of land opposite a church in Memphis, Tennessee, the local Muslim community expected hostility. Pastor Steve Stone had something else in mind.

Upstanders: The Mosque Across the Street

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2016/09/20160812upstanders_memphis_001.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2016/upstanders-the-mosque-across-the-street/

In contrast to the divisiveness and cynicism currently fueling our national discourse, Starbucks created "Upstanders," its first original content series, which aims to inspire Americans to engage in acts of compassion, citizenship and civility. “Upstanders” features ten stories, each told in written, video and podcast form, about ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities. The series is written and produced by Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and ceo, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Starbucks executive producer and a former senior editor of The Washington Post.

The first time Hassan Foster stole a car, he drove off without any beginner’s luck. As he parked the vehicle on a Newark street, a police officer happened by, noticed his nervousness, and asked to see his driver’s license. A few minutes later, Foster was in handcuffs.

Had he stolen the car a week earlier, before his 18th birthday Foster likely would have received a slap on the wrist. But in the eyes of the law, he was a juvenile no longer, so he wound up in the Essex County jail. The two months he spent there meant he missed enough classes that he’d have to repeat his senior year of high school in order to graduate. Though he was a straight-B student and a member of the basketball team, he had no desire to spend the next year with younger kids.

So Foster headed down a well-worn path in Newark’s south ward: gang life, street crimes, drug addiction. “And, from there,” he says, “incarceration, incarceration, incarceration.”

When he wasn’t behind bars, he’d return to his old ways. One night, his best friend, with whom he sold drugs, went missing. Foster eventually found his buddy’s shot-up body in the backyard of an abandoned house. As he mourned, he grappled with thoughts of that could have easily been me. And he resolved to change his life.

Which is when he saw a flier at a neighbor’s house for an organization called YouthBuild that helps dropouts ages 16 to 24 get their high-school equivalency degree. Intrigued, he applied.

Then he learned there was a catch. Participants don’t just take GED classes; they also spend a year serving their communities, rebuilding dilapidated homes that are then sold at below-market prices to low-income families.

Foster was worried. He had no construction skills. “I’m used to destroying things,” he says. “Not fixing them.”

His initial weeks at the construction site – a row house that was to be gutted and rebuilt from the studs up – were daunting. “I wasn’t used to getting up and doing hard work.”

Before long, though, he got the hang of hammering, sawing, drilling, and grouting. He excelled at the work. Instead of grousing, he took to saying, “Let me help you.”

Today, Foster is employed by Home Depot to work with professional contractors – a job he has held for eight years – and he is an attentive father to two daughters. If not for his time at YouthBuild, he says, “I wouldn’t be a tenth of the man I am. I don’t know if I’d even be alive.”

The credits for Foster’s transformation could roll for minutes. His own perseverance. His site foremen. His teachers. His fellow YouthBuild members. But he drew his most profound example from Robert Clark, the affable 45 year old who leads YouthBuild’s program in Newark.

“This man came from what I came from,” Foster says. “He showed me it could be done.”

Robert Clark is paying it forward in a remarkable way: He is the first YouthBuild graduate to lead a YouthBuild program in a major American city. He overcame a past of crime and addiction to help thousands of young people in a poor, violent urban community surmount their own obstacles and start new lives.

His journey has been a source of inspiration to many more than Foster. It motivates those who join YouthBuild in the city, and it has awed the program’s national leaders.

“Robert has made the choice to give back in every way that he can to change the conditions that are damaging other human beings,” says Dorothy Stoneman, the civil rights activist and educator who founded YouthBuild in 1978 in East Harlem, New York, and has shepherded the expansion of this remarkably successful general-education diploma program to 260 communities in 46 states.

Born in Boston, Clark grew up in public housing. When he was a young boy, his mother, who had struggled with drug addiction, died, and his grandmother sent him to live with a succession of relatives in Kentucky, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. He returned to his rough-and-tumble Boston neighborhood to attend high school, but dropped out during ninth grade and ran away from home.

“I didn’t really know what I was running from, or where I was running to, but I ran,” he recalls. “I was in search of who I was.”

The rest of his teenage years were a blur of heroin use, petty crime, drug dealing, and jail time.

His turnaround began soon after his 21st birthday, inside the Norfolk County Correctional Center, in the suburb of Dedham. He had just finished a game of handball with two older inmates when the conversation turned to what they planned to do when they got out. The older men talked about turning back to crime and drugs.

Twenty years from now, I don’t want to be one of these guys, Clark thought. I want to make something of my life.

The day he was released, he decided he wouldn’t go back to his old neighborhood, where he’d be seduced into using heroin again. He wandered the streets of Cambridge, eventually finding a bed in a Salvation Army homeless shelter. The next day, he checked himself into a drug treatment center.

One weekend, he spotted a buddy from his old neighborhood walking down the street with a tool belt buckled around his waist. “He had a different bop about him. He was talking different. His face was shining. He had a sense of purpose and electricity that I’d never seen before. And I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with you?’”

His friend said he had joined a YouthBuild program in Boston. “Bobby, you should check it out,” he said.

Clark pleaded with his treatment counselor for permission to go. “It was a magical experience,” he says. “The interactions with staff, the discussions held by young people, the work – it was a different space from anything I knew.”

Clark joined YouthBuild, and he soon discovered skills that extended well beyond the ability to swing a hammer. One day, Stoneman brought a group of legislators to meet YouthBuild participants. Clark transfixed them as he recounted his teenage years and the role YouthBuild had played in helping him change course. A few weeks later, Stoneman asked Clark to fly to Washington to speak at a conference organized by the Children’s Defense Fund.

“He could communicate the reality of what young people faced so profoundly,” she says. She recalls that, at a different conference, arranged by a prominent urban affairs organization, he so outshone the group’s president that it refused to invite him to speak again.

After finishing the year-long YouthBuild program, Clark was accepted into Public Allies, a prestigious leadership-development service program that typically is the domain of college graduates, not GED recipients. That, in turn, led Clark to Newark, where he started studying at Rutgers University, with tuition covered by YouthBuild and some of the group’s well-heeled supporters, who were awed by his commitment to helping others.

It was a spectacular journey, in just a few years, from the jail in Dedham. But for the first time since then he found himself on his own, without a network of support like he’d had at the drug treatment center, YouthBuild, or Public Allies.

During the winter break after his first term, because he had no place he called home, he stayed in his otherwise empty dormitory. Soon he grew bored. He hit the chilly streets, seeking a way to relieve his funk. He ended up at the Prince Street housing projects, a place where drugs were notoriously easy to come by.

“I found those things that had haunted me in the past,” he says.

He fell back into drugs. And that led to his arrest. But his benefactors refused to give up on him. Concerned, they called him and pledged to help him get back on his feet.

“There was no judgment. There was no, ‘You’ve disappointed us.’ And, ‘How could you waste our investment?’” he recalls with tears in his eyes. “There was unconditional love.”

After he was released from jail, he returned to Boston, where he re-entered the drug rehabilitation facility, completed college at the University of Massachusetts, and worked at the Boston Medical Center and the Boston Public Health Commission. A few years later, Stoneman reached out with an idea: YouthBuild would be expanding to Newark. Did he want to join the team that would set up the program?

He was nervous. “The last time I was in Newark, I fell flat on my face.” But he accepted the offer.

In 2003, he was tapped to serve as the executive director of the Newark program.

“His heart has always been filled with trying to make the world a better place,” she says. “He had a chance to join something that was structured to bring out the best in him, and so he blossomed, and then he said, ‘I’m gonna share this. I’m going to make it possible for as many people as possible to thrive.’”

Since the YouthBuild program was established in Newark in 2003, more than 2,500 people have completed a year-long construction service project and received their GEDs. More than 60 abandoned homes have been rebuilt and sold to low-income families.

“He’s helped to save lives,” Richard Roper, a member of Rutgers’s Board of Governors, says of Clark. YouthBuild has “become an important part of the social fabric of the city.”

Clark, however, sees more to be done. Instead of focusing exclusively on young people who have dropped out of high school, he is working with the Newark Public Schools on new measures to keep kids enrolled. Among them is a YouthBuild-influenced summer school built around service projects and team-building exercises meant to engage students who might otherwise end their education.

His emphasis on being present for young people extends to his own home. He has four children, and the youngest two – ages six and eight – live with him and his wife. Being an attentive father and husband, he says, “is as important as service to the community.”

He recently received approval from New Jersey officials to open the state’s first alternative-education charter school in Newark in 2017. The school, which will be open to people ages 16 to 21 who have dropped out, will combine job-training and service learning programs to teach the necessary skills to obtain a high school diploma.

In Newark, there are about 4,000 people of high school age who aren’t in school, according to Christopher Cerf, the city’s schools superintendent. He estimates that an additional 3,000 people ages 18 to 21 lack high school degrees.

“There are a lot of young people for whom the traditional school system doesn’t work,” Cerf says. “That’s why what Robert is doing, and what he is going to do for this city, is so important.”

On a sweltering morning this summer, Quanesha Reily walked into a row house three miles west of Newark’s airport, laced up her construction boots, and pushed a yellow hard hat down over her braided hair. Then, before starting to hang drywall in a second-floor bedroom, she gathered with a half-dozen fellow YouthBuild volunteers for their morning meeting, and a communal recital of the group’s philosophy.

“We recognize that, as young people, we are one of the greatest resources available to the survival of the community,” they said in unison. “Therefore, we stand ready and willing and hereby pledge our commitment to rebuild and improve the quality of life in our community through collective work...”

Four years ago, Reily dropped out of high school in her senior year, when she got pregnant and failed a state-mandated math exam. As her daughter grew into a toddler, she’d sit at home and think about her future.

I could be doing more, she told herself. I should have a career. But I need to finish high school.

Finding a way to do that seemed insurmountable. “I felt hopeless,” she recalls.

When she joined YouthBuild, her initial weeks were filled with doubt and despair. She questioned whether she would be able to hold her own at a construction site. But she refused to give up.

And soon enough, just as Hassan Foster turned a corner, so did she. The early starts, the manual labor, the power tools – they no longer scared her. She drew strength and confidence from the work.

“I began to realize that if I can do this, and this is not easy work, then I can get through more obstacles,” she says. “I can get through much more than this.”

&nbsp;Reily’s transformation, like that of so many other YouthBuild members in Newark, is inspired by Clark. The environment he has created. The forgiveness he demonstrates. The power of his example.

Clark, she says, “makes me think that nothing’s impossible.”

A Starbucks Original Series: After spending his teenage years in and out of jail, Robert Clark turned his life around. Now he’s committed himself to helping the at-risk youth of Newark do the same, by leading them in building homes for poor families.

Upstanders: Building Homes, Building Lives

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2016/09/YOUTHBUILD_002.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2016/upstanders-building-homes-building-lives/

Brian Aft was rolling his wheelchair through a strip-mall parking lot in Dallas with a Styrofoam cup of juice perched on his lap when a pickup truck screeched to a stop in front of him. Out bounded a tall, muscled man with shoulder-length hair.

It would have been yet another bad turn in his life since stepping on a Taliban bomb buried in an embankment in Afghanistan in 2011 during a tour with the Marines. He had lost both of his legs. In the three years since, he had been wracked with painful pressure ulcers. When the pills dispensed by VA doctors failed to help, he turned to heroin – enough of it, every day, he told friends, “to kill a horse.” He was jobless and disheveled. And he was sleeping with a loaded gun next to his head.

But the man in the truck didn’t demand his money.

“I’m Dave Vobora,” he said, speaking with the speed of an auctioneer. “I’m a retired NFL player. What happened to you?”

“I got blown up in Afghanistan,” Aft replied.

Vobora invited Aft to a cavernous gym he had established a few months earlier to strengthen elite athletes and tone the bodies of well-heeled Dallas residents. “Let me train you,” he offered.

Stories (10)

Upstanders: Scholarships for Every Student

Upstanders: The Mosque Across the Street

Upstanders: Building Homes, Building Lives

Upstanders: A Warrior’s Workout

Upstanders: Employing the Full Spectrum

Upstanders: The Empathetic Police Academy

Upstanders: The Hunger Hack

Upstanders: The Kids Who Killed an Incinerator

Upstanders: Homes for Everyone

Upstanders: Breaking the Prison Pipeline

sbux_upstanders_logo_FINAL_ahCreated using Figma

Stories (10)

Upstanders: Scholarships for Every Student

Upstanders: The Mosque Across the Street

Upstanders: Building Homes, Building Lives

Upstanders: A Warrior’s Workout

Upstanders: Employing the Full Spectrum

Upstanders: The Empathetic Police Academy

Upstanders: The Hunger Hack

Upstanders: The Kids Who Killed an Incinerator

Upstanders: Homes for Everyone

Upstanders: Breaking the Prison Pipeline