Allan Appel Photo
Brooks with 7-month old Grace Jennings, his fellow mentor’s baby.
Michael Brooks has joined New Haven’s newest posse — a “Gang of Dads” looking to help save young people headed for trouble and the wrong kind of gangs.
Brooks is a busy man. He runs an insurance business. He is raising two boys with his wife.
Still he found time to participate with other men in a professional mentoring program. They completed the training. The Gang of Dads launched their first public outreach session at a meeting at the Conte/West Hills School last week. Now they’re set to start working with kids who have already gotten in trouble with the law and are one step away from going to jail.
A sample of what they learned in the training, about how to talk with the new charges:
• “What did you like best and worst about your day?” That’s an open-ended question that elicits dialogue, relationship, and ultimately trust.
• “How was your day?” That’s a closed question that invites a yes or no answer and a possible direct return to the video game
New Haven has a range of other mentoring programs in town at kids’ schools, clubs, and area churches, even one at Gang of Dads’ founder Pastor Todd Foster’s own Church on the Rock. Gang of Dads is the newest in town, one that aims to offer arguably the most intense and professional training.
Gang of Dads’ first “class” of mentors, all young men from Foster’s congregation on Hamilton Street, have been trained at the New Haven Family Alliance.
They have gone through a battery of tests and a curriculum prepared by Kyisha Velazquez, who runs that organization’s Judicial Review Board (JRB). Kids who get arrested for a first misdemeanor often get sent to the JRB as an alternative to going through the juvenile justice system, as a way for adults int he community to try to steer them to the right path.
“We know there is a need,” said Foster, who launched the organization in the spring after a father-less member of his congregation got in trouble. Because fatherless-ness is correlated with poverty, school expulsions, and many other woes, Foster put out the call.
About 20 men in his congregation volunteered, including Brooks, who runs an insurance business and is raising two boys with his wife; and Terence Jennings, who also hails from Hamden, where he is a banker and the new dad of charming baby Grace.
Both are busy men. Both share Foster’s sense that the need is great, particularly in New Haven.
Foster and Velazquez.
“We have the good heart and the best of intentions, but we needed training,” said Foster, who has also spearheaded other initiatives in town such as churches adopting a school. His Greater New Haven Help Alliance is in its second year of “adopting” the Lincoln-Bassett School.
Click here for a fuller description of Gang of Dads’ mission and more detail on the consequences of fatherless-ness.
The first group of kids being matched with their mentors like Brooks and Terence Jennings (pictured) will be coming out of the JRB, a restorative justice program that offers juvenile offenders non-penal ways to make amends.
The prescriptions these young men receive often includes a requirement that they receive a mentor, said Velazquez, who attended Thursday’s session and helped serve and eat the many pizzas that were provided.
One of the reasons for professionalizing the training is that kids, ages 8 to 18 coming, are genuinely at risk. Some of the mentors had anxieties about how to be responsive in different, sometimes demanding situations.
How do you respond, for example, when a mentee talks about causing harm to himself or to another?
“There are protocols for that,” said Brooks that he received in the training, along with a big binder of material, with numbers to call for consultation and back up.
But by and large the training has provided tools such as analysis of what kinds of opening gambits work and don’t in order for the mentors to become good listeners and to build relationships based on trust.
Or as Jennings put it: “How to be a voice of reason for a young person, walk them through decision process. We’re taught how to handle yourself in conversation.”
Jenning is already a “big brother” for his three cousins growing up in a tough neighborhood of Bridgeport.
Jennings, still a young man and young father at 26, he came to realize during the training that the childhood for fatherless kids and maybe kids in general is not the way he remembers it.
“We think of kids playing with Tonka trucks. But it’s really much more serious stuff,” he said.
Brooks, the father of two young teens, knows that if you don’t hold the conversation the right way — and even if you do — “boys will close up. Our [most basic] role is the good listener,” he added.
The JRB’s Velazquez said the matching of mentor and mentee has included both parties taking surveys that ask questions like: How did you do in school? And: Have you had an opportunity to take something not yours?
The structured program, with surveys, training, and background checks on both sides is giving a level of comfort to mentors like Jennings and Brooks.
Velazquez says that the matches are being made, more mentors are being recruited, and the program is going to be rolled out to more children beyond the JRB circle in the weeks and months ahead.
“We know there’s a need out there,” said Foster.
“My wanting there to be change in the streets is not enough. There needs to be sacrifice of my time” to make that happen. If as a result he’s able to keep even one kid off the streets, that will have been worth it, he said.