By Lornet Turnbull
Special to The Medium
Back-to-school signs are everywhere, as students turn their attention from endless summer days to homework and class assignments.
At five Seattle area high schools, about 100 African American young men this fall will sign up for a one-credit class that has little to do with humanities or math.
Instead, they’ll be taught valuable life skills, about the importance of staying in school and staying on track, about personal responsibility and making a good impression – lessons delivered by certified African American instructors, some of them men who have earned their credentials in the school of hard knocks.
Project M.I.S.T.E.R, as it is known, is a signature program of the Breakfast Group, an organization of about 75 prominent professional Black men seeking to help disadvantaged young men achieve overall success.
The group got its start 40 years ago when some Seattle-area friends began getting together on Fridays after work to network and find ways to support one another.
They were the pioneers at places like Bon Marché and Nordstrom, Xerox and IBM, says Paul Mitchell, one of the founders. They were doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs and educators. FBI and Secret Service men.
“We came along about the time when major corporations were starting to integrate their management levels,” said Ernie Dunston, another of the founders, who back then worked for Sears Roebuck.
“A lot of us were being hired by those companies and in many cases were the only Black executives,” he said. “There was nobody trying to mentor us.”
So when they got together, they’d compare notes and mentor one another.
A new focus
What began as weekly meetups to socialize evolved into an organized group of accomplished men using their skills, influence and professional connections to raise the prospects for a new generation.
Despite Seattle’s strong economic growth, the members say, young men of color still face poverty, joblessness, incarceration and other problems at a disturbingly high rate.
These are kids, who according to coaches, counselors and other school officials, struggle in school for a number of reasons – gang activity, drugs, and disruption in class.
Many have poor class attendance, are academically disengaged and on the verge of dropping out. Up to half have already been incarcerated in the juvenile justice system. Many either have fathers absent from the home or incarcerated.
And recently, Dunston said, a growing number have been homeless, though still showing up for classes.
In recent years, the group has tried to mix the classes up, including in them high-achieving students who serve as peer role-models for those students having a harder time.
“We are providing these kids with real life examples of leadership in people who look like them,” said Darryl Russell, vice president of the organization and president of the Russell Group.
That’s even more crucial considering the disturbing events in recent years that have given rise to such movements as Black Lives Matter.
Breakfast Group President Amani Harris calls it a “symptom of the negative imaging.”
“We want to have a role in positive imaging,” Harris said. “There’re a lot of economic opportunities ahead and we want to have a role in bringing those opportunities to communities that are struggling.”
Different ways to help
Many of the organization’s programs are aimed at doing just that – starting with youth.
About 90 students from area high schools attend its Tie-One-On annual luncheon and fundraiser, which Turner Construction Co. and the Fairmont Olympic Hotel have sponsored from the start.
Each student is assigned a mentor for the day and each is presented with a shirt and traditional neck tie as symbols of their potential. The students have been designing the ties for years.
Additionally, the group each year awards between $15,000 and $18,000 in scholarships to young men in its All Achievers’ program – college and high school students who show great promise and who have demonstrated positive change in academics, attendance, community service and other areas.
Project M.I.S.T.E.R, which stands for Male Involvement and Service To Encourage Responsibility, is the group’s flagship program. Its classes are in five Seattle high schools: Rainier Beach, Cleveland, Franklin, Garfield and South Lake Alternative.
“They produce incredible results with our students,” Seattle Public Schools spokesman Luke Duecy said in a statement. “They are one of the groups in our community that are truly making a difference.”
Project M.I.S.T.E.R was started by Medina Children’s Services, now Amara, as a mentorship program for at-risk boys at Sharples Alternative School. (Sharples later became Aki Kurose.)
The Breakfast Group partnered with Medina to run the program in 1986, eventually transferring it to John Marshall Alternative High School. Two years later, the group established a fiscal partnership with the Urban League after Medina changed directions to focus solely on adoptions.
Modeling success
Dunston and Mitchell said the program gave the group an opportunity to address some of the disturbing trends that were starting to emerge among young Black men.
Additionally, “They realized that if they were going to prepare the next generation of middle managers, they needed to start in high school – modeling the kind of behavior and attitude necessary to succeed at the corporate level.”
The Project M.I.S.T.E.R curriculum was developed around basic life skills and aims to help these young men take charge of their lives, reduce risky behavior, improve verbal expressions, network and seek out role models. It teaches them how to write a resume and look for a job.
The program paints college as an option after high school but helps the students plan and prepare for employment or trade school, too, if those are the paths they choose.
They get to tour the campuses of high-tech companies as well as prisons.
Local employers and members of the Breakfast Group visit the classes to talk to them about career opportunities. They hear from law-enforcement officials on a variety of issues – including possible employment.
Monitored by Seattle Public School teachers, the classes open up whole new avenues for these young people, Harris said. “They see all these career options that they had never considered and they see black men they can emulate in a professional capacity.”
Mitchell said many start out saying they want to be professional athletes or entertainers. “So we bring in agents and athletes to talk to them, for them to see what it takes.
“By the end, many of them want to be lawyers or business owners,” he said. “They get to see what they can become.”
Looking ahead
The group believes it’s making a difference, saying its students are more likely to stay in school, stay out of trouble and start planning their futures than their peers who don’t get help.
Members have been looking for ways to expand and enhance the program and will add a second class at Garfield this year.
Additionally, members Al Herron, an entrepreneur whose many businesses include STEMTAC, and Christopher Web, are working to introduce Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and Digital Access Platform components to Project M.I.S.T.E.R.
The aim is to not only help students develop technical skills that could open more career and employment opportunities to them, Herron said, but to link them to the resources they need to access those opportunities.
Now in its 40th year, with an official celebration scheduled for Feb. 9th 2017 at the Fairmont, the group is seeking to broaden its reach.
Members are exploring ways to increase diversity among Puget Sound area employers and encourage entrepreneurship within the local community.
At the same time, the group is facing a challenge that is confronting other social and community service organizations: attracting young members to ensure survival.
About a third of Breakfast Group members are retired and most are over 50.
In the years after the Breakfast Group was formed, recruitment was simple, Dunston and Mitchell said. It was the organization of choice for many professional transplants looking for ways to volunteer and contribute to the community.
“Back then we had a common cause and were fighting against the same things,” Dunston said. “People were joining to be part of and to support the efforts of the organizations. Nowadays, kids think everything is post-racial.”
At the same time, Harris said, members have been so focused on helping troubled youth, they’ve lost sight of the need to grow the organization.
They’re going to need to change that, he said.
