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Photo courtesy of the Aspire Movement.
Students and mentors participate in regular activity days like this one at Oak Mountain State Park. For bike outings, Aspire partners with Trips for Kids, which provides free lunch and training and the use of mountain bikes and helmets.
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Photo courtesy of the Aspire Movement.
Birmingham businessman and Aspire mentor Wesley Legg, seated, discusses the latest book student Michael is reading.
Believing that being a church pastor was his destiny, Jason Williams was pursuing a Master of Divinity degree from Birmingham Theological Seminary when he took a part-time job in an inner-city ministry.
“One of the things I saw was a huge need to advocate for those from fatherless homes, which statistics show can often lead to dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, drugs and crime,” he said. “I was exposed to all kinds of people, issues and injustice and saw the need for trying to create ways for young people who had been cast aside to have access to people that had means, a network and opportunity.”
It was this realization that gave birth to what is today the Aspire Movement, a mentoring program that works to bridge race, socio-economic and generational gaps through the opportunity to form mutually transforming relationships between young people and adults.
The program encourages leadership development that equips both the mentor and student to enter their communities to make future impacts. Based in Hoover, the Aspire Movement reaches students throughout the Birmingham area primarily through schools while recruiting mentors through church partnerships.
“We have an 88 percent retention rate of mentors, and when a mentor quits or moves, we rematch the kids, so they stay in the program,” Williams said.
According to Williams, mentors engage with students in various ways, such as spending time in the student’s world for lunches at school, tutoring sessions and “hanging out” in their communities for various activities. Mentors also bring the students into their world and communities for different activities that might be as simple as lunch at Chick-fil-A, a visit to Oak Mountain State Park or a trip to the movies.
“Some of our students don’t even know the park is there, have never touched a horse or a cow,” Williams said. “You’d be amazed at the things many have never done.”
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Aspire Movement began in the 2011-12 school year at one school with 13 mentor/student matches. It expanded in the 2013-14 year to four schools and 65 matches, and this school year has 168 mentor/student matches in 10 schools with two ministry partners, Grace House and Oak Tree Ministries.
The Aspire Movement’s Life on Life, or mentoring program, begins with fourth-grade students and encourages mentors to remain with their charges until they graduate, but it is only one component of the organization.
The Aspire Club is a weekly after-school program of reading, activities and group interaction designed to reach the youth in public schools who are waiting for a mentor.
General Aspire activities can be group events that include going to the Civil Rights Institute, Barons baseball games, bike riding at Oak Mountain State Park, cookouts, volunteering and projects.
According to Williams, the Aspire Leadership Development is a recent addition where students are chosen to take part in relational and academic challenges.
“We are hoping to not only do classroom training on what it means to be a godly leader, but also provide a venue for them to go into the public school and mentor younger students,” Williams said. “This is how we transition our growing students into getting a vision for their community.”
Nick Thornton has been an Aspire Movement mentor since the organization’s inception and also serves on its board. He’s been matched with his student for a year, and their times together have included biking, gatherings at the Thornton family home in Hoover to play basketball, watching sports and a recent trip to Tuscaloosa with the eldest Thornton daughter for a University of Alabama football game.
“The most important part of our time together is the opportunity to have basic conversations and get to know each other as individuals,” Thornton said. “It can be difficult to build trust so that young people don’t believe you’re here and not gone tomorrow, but happily we’ve started to have two-way talks where he asks questions, and we have regular dialogue.”
And it is that effort — not to fix a child, but to develop a relationship with him — that is the thrust of the Aspire Movement, Williams said.
“It is true that our society changes through our children, and our vision is for the next generation’s leadership and to help transform impoverished communities by empowering the people that live there,” Williams said. “It’s our legacy that the kids we mentor become mentors in the future.”
For more information, go to aspiremovement.com or call 235-2355.