ENGLEWOOD — Pamela Porterfield wanted to shield her son from the violence and trouble found in the streets, so she signed him up for a male mentoring program.
“I live in the Englewood area, and it’s just a really tough area,” Porterfield, 56, said.
Her two sons’ father is in their lives, but “it still felt like they needed more mentorship, more role models,” she said. “They needed to see that black men can be successful and that it’s not about the streets or gangs or anything like that.”
Porterfield’s 12-year-old son Antonio Milian has been with the Concerned Christian Men group for four years. Her 16-year-old son is no longer in the program.
The Roseland-based organization was founded in 1996 and serves schools all over the South Side, but mostly in Chatham, Gresham, Englewood and Roseland.
The focus has always been to offer South Side black children examples of strong black male leadership and give them guidance. The group hosts career fairs and offers vocational training to expose the kids to fields they might never learn about until they are adults, said executive director Philip Craig.
He said the group recently surveyed 400 boys and learned that 41 percent of them said they wanted to become professional athletes.
“The third most common career choice that they put down was ‘I don’t know,’ and many of the boys were like ‘If I can’t become a professional basketball player, if I can’t become an NFL player, then I don’t know what I would do,’" Craig said.
His said that staffers strive to help shape the young participants into contributing members of their communities. The nonprofit has male mentoring activities for fourth- through eighth-grade boys, including a monthly conference, after-school programs, a summer camp and more.
Antonio said he has enjoyed hearing from the keynote speakers, but he really liked the career workshop. He said that thanks to the workshop he now can see himself as an entrepreneur.
“Most kids want to be a basketball player or rapper, but me, I want to do something that’s productive and would still get me money,” he said.
A recent competition challenged the young men to write an essay listing one thing God would like them to do. Antonio wrote that he could help his mother more and began to do more chores.
His essay earned him a $100 cash prize.
“It touched my heart,” Porterfield said.
Porterfield said that Englewood has declined a lot since her childhood, so she appreciates programs like this.
“The village is nothing like it was when I was coming up,” she said. “These children can’t even go outside and play without gunfire. I can’t even allow them to sometimes sit on the front porch, and it’s just sad.”
The organization’s annual banquet and summer camp trip helps a lot, she said.
“If they can leave the hood for just four days and be able to do positive things with positive role models, well this is a program that should be around forever,” she said.
The nonprofit has hosted more than 42,000 boys and men at its monthly breakfast conferences. There have been more than 174 such breakfasts, which have brought such notable keynote speakers as Barack Obama when he was senator and former Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith.
This summer, the organization will start a new After School Matters program, a mentoring club led by 15 teen boys, Craig said. The high schoolers will develop the mentoring program themselves to learn how to be leaders and have an impact on their community, he said.
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