The change bus

YOUTH BELIEVING IN CHANGE IS A NO-FLUNK ZONE

In 1970, Nina Simone released the song, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”

Those were the words Vince Gaddis grew up on. His schoolteacher mother had these words in her classroom, and the neighborhood where he grew up had high expectations.

“We were taught that, and we believed that,”

Gaddis says. “That’s what drove us, and so regardless of what happened, we would go back to that.”

Now he drives the “Change Bus” for the nonprofit he founded in 1995, Youth Believing in Change.

The bus picks up children from school, brings them to tutoring and feeds them. The nonprofit has provided 28,000 after-school meals and 110,000 summer meals over the past 24 years. They serve 150 kids of varying ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds about 310 days a year.

Youth Believing in Change almost wasn’t.

Gaddis was working for the Greater Dallas Community of Churches in 1995, when two national tragedies struck: The Oklahoma City bombing and the death of Tejano star Selena.

“I want to help people, and they’re just killing people en masse,” he recalls thinking.

“This is it; I can’t do this anymore.”

That week, a little girl named Laura Flores gave him a thank-you letter for coming to her school.

“I had never felt that feeling of affirmation in my entire life,” he says.

“It was really what I had been living for, but I had never found it, never felt it.”

That’s when Gaddis decided to devote his work to helping children.

“There was like this seed inside of me that begin to swell up even more and more,” Gaddis says.

Youth Believing in Change is a “no-flunk zone,” he says.

He wants all of them to graduate from high school and enter vocational school, community college, university or the military.

Gaddis says the program’s students have gone to work in ministry, public service and armed forces. Some have gone on to pursue master’s and doctorate degrees.

Some former students have come back with their own children. Gaddis keeps scrapbooks on his desk that look like they’re straight from the ’90s. He flips through them and recalls field trips, events and students.

“If you don’t have something that makes you toss, turn, toil and labor through the night, then you probably have nothing to look forward to the next day,” he says.

You can mentor

FORERUNNER MENTORING GIVES SUPPORT TO FATHERLESS CHILDREN AND SINGLE MOTHERS

Zach Garza had a tough childhood.

In his podcast, “You Can Mentor,” he’s open about his parents’ split and abandonment struggles, such as being unable to tie a tie for his eighth-grade dance and not knowing how to shave properly until he was 25.

Garza was on a path without direction or anyone to guide him. Fortunately, he gained a mentor in college who changed his life by showing up and speaking truth.

For the first time, a male figure was open and honest about the things he saw in Garza, good and bad. He gave Garza someone to look up to.

“Sometimes we like to make mentoring a whole lot more complicated than it actually is,” Garza says. “Mentoring is really just investing into the life of someone in an intentional way.”

As a coach at Lake Highlands Junior High, many of the kids reminded him of his former self; they had a lot of potential, they were good kids, but they could benefit from some guidance, attention, love and acceptance. So he created Forerunner Mentoring in 2009, received nonprofit status in 2011 and went full-time in 2015.

“One of the main questions that we ask ourselves here is, ‘If a boy grows up in a home where there’s no positive role model, then who is going to teach that child how to become a successful person?’” Garza says.

Forerunner has expanded to include an after-school program that serves students from every elementary that feeds into LHJH. The day is split into three sections: fun, character and academics.

“We focus in on something new each month, so this month we are talking about how to take initiative, so we talk about that. We talk about how to be respectful, how to care for others. They’re just the soft skills to help our kids look more like Jesus,” Garza says.

While the Forerunner after-school program is open to all boys, the mentoring program is specifically for boys without a father figure. Mentors are encouraged to spend time with their kids at least every other week.

The group also provides a network for mothers.

“It is of the utmost importance that we be on the same page as mom and that we are doing everything that we can to help her flourish as she leads her family,” he says. “We believe that it is not good for a person to be alone, so we try to just provide friendships for our moms, we try to provide community for them so that they don’t feel like they’re doing this whole thing by themselves.”

Socials for single mothers offer a chance for them to meet and mingle, eat dinner together and talk about life and parenting.

“I have a lot of compassion for my mom as I look back at my childhood. I just can’t imagine how difficult it was to not only provide for the family but also to try to turn a boy into a man,” Garza says. “That really is what I see with these moms is that they have sacrificed so much just to give their kids the best opportunity for them to fulfill their potential.”