How UTM breaks the fatherless Cycle-Part 3 (Connecting)
I’m sure most of us have heard the adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” This pithy slogan is not meant to minimize a person’s competency and hard work as part of their success, but rather explain how social relationships play such a vital role in providing opportunities for their success. When I look back on my own life, so many doors of opportunities opened because of the “social capital” I already had. My first job as a cashier and stocker at Kmart came about because its store manager was the father of a close friend of mine that I grew up with at church. My father’s connections as an alumnus of Grand Rapids Baptist College (now Cornerstone University) and my church’s connections to an association of Baptist churches (so that I could enter and win a national music contest that they sponsored) helped me receive significant music scholarships so that I could afford to go to college. My first career job in the non-profit world as a homeless shelter manager for Servants Center came about twenty-six years ago because of my mentee relationship with its executive director at the time, Don Tack.
As parents, Sherilyn and I teach our kids to leverage their social connections to open doors of opportunities. Last summer, my son Jalen pursued a job and was hired by one of his distant cousins (a landlord of approximately 200 homes in West Michigan) where he learned home repair and construction. This summer, Jalen most likely will work for a furniture factory that is owned by the fathers of a couple of his former football teammates from high school because the job is flexible in allowing him to take a college class at GRCC as well as to keep up with the strength and conditioning demands that it takes to play college football for Wheaton College.
In contrast, urban youth in my neighborhood who are growing up fatherless are also growing up without the positive social connections and relationships that many of us take for granted. Because of broken relationships within families for several generations, fatherless youth and young adults are cut off from their fathers, especially among men of color. This includes “Friend of the Court” custody battles which keep some UTM students from enjoying positive relationships with their fathers as well as overcriminalization and mass incarceration among fathers of UTM students for
That is why UTM has made Connecting such a vital part of its strategy to break the fatherless cycle. When UTM uses the word connecting, we mean “Creating social capital for fatherless youth and young adults through connections to mentors, business people/entrepreneurs, counselors, educators, and etc who offer skills and resources to empower them in every area of their lives. Specifically, within every activity and program that UTM oversees, we purposely encourage our students to connect with multiple adult mentors with different skill sets. These mentors, in turn, share their gifts, skills, and resources which create numerous opportunities and empower fatherless youth and young adults to govern their lives without becoming dependent on charity or the government. For instance, many (not all) of the living-wage employment that ManUP residents attained while in the ManUP program came about through business connections that UTM had developed over the years. Although the majority of ManUP graduates are not currently employed by these same businesses, they benefited greatly from these job opportunities through learning different trades and skills, not to mention how it strengthened and improved their resumes for their future living-wage employment. In UTM’s newest program, Hustle City (which all of the ManUP residents are required to attend), participants learn how to manage their money and are taught what it takes to build a business from the ground up. What’s more, they are introduced and mentored by business owners and others that help take their business ideas and give them tools to make it a reality.
At the youth level, UTM staff and volunteers leverage their social capital to help create opportunities for UTM youth as well. Over the many years of mentoring fatherless youth, UTM staff and volunteers have used their natural web of social relationships to meet entrepreneurs, doctors, and nurses in the medical field, social workers, lawyers, and general contractors. They pulled strings with the people they know so that fatherless teenage youth could obtain their first job or take part in a job internship to discover their future career.
To sum up, the same connections that all of us UTM staff and volunteers leverage for our own personal families, we also leverage for our UTM family of fatherless youth and young adults. After all, isn’t this what it means to “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself?”