Filed under: News, Interviews, Race and Civil Rights
Eighteen teenage girls from Park Heights sit in a circle at the St. Ambrose Outreach Center in the Park Heights neighborhood of Baltimore City, a neighborhood known more for its heinous statistics -- including alarming drop-out rates and teenage pregnancy numbers -- and less for the bright smiles that fill the room.
The girls are giving positive affirmations to each other and to the adult volunteers as a way of greeting each other. They are generous with compliments and are eager to share. Any parent of a teenager would feel like they stepped into the Twilight Zone if they entered this room.
As the girls pour their libations into a plant and offer their thanks, it becomes clear that this is a space where their gentle spirits and positive energy are celebrated. It's a place where they don't have to pretend -- a place where they're safe. Meshelle Foreman Shields, comedienne, mother, wife and director of the Goal DIGGERS: The Sankofa Project provides this safe haven for them.
Shields, a native of this Park Heights neighborhood, began this program with the help of an Open Society Institute Fellowship. Shields believes that this will be the ultimate transformative experience and hopes to have a program like this become a national model. The girls are being followed by a videographer that will document this transformation.
The success of this project could change the way educators look at inner-city, largely black educational systems and how they work with and educate their students. If identity is at the crux of student achievement, particularly young girls, and having confidence inside and outside of the classroom, then the national model will have to change as it relates to African-American children.
It's long overdue for an overhaul.
Shields took a moment to talk to Aol.Black Voices about this innovative program:
BV: So I saw your stand-up, you are hilarious. But you also went the traditional route, you went to school...
Meshelle Foreman Shields: Yes, I was a year away from a doctorate. I took a year of absence going into my fourth year of my Ph.D. My advisor came to a show when I was living in Philadelphia, sat in the back, uninvited, and was just watching me. You know, lightweight stalking. She called me into the office, and I'm thinking I'm in trouble. She was like you're gonna hate yourself if you don't pursue your stand-up comedy because this is a gift. I'm thinking this is kind of nontraditional. I took a leave of absence for a year. I gave God a year to be a rock star and that was 13years ago. Since then I've done a number of premium cable shows. I was studying school psychology at the time, determining giftedness and special needs and learning disabilities. My sister says being a stand-up allows me to treat more people at one time.
BV: I love the concept of the Goal DIGGERS project.
MFS: It's a culmination of everything I've ever done. I've been working with kids' groups in the Park Heights community. I grew up in Park Heights and in the northwest suburbs of Baltimore. I've always worked with women and girls of color. I'm just real clear that exposure is everything. Growing up in those two worlds, it was two different worlds and the balance of both of them have made me comfortable in my skin wherever I go.
There's something that I got from those girls that I went to school with that I always marveled at and in a lot of ways I wish that I had. It wasn't their stuff; it was the fact that a lot of them knew their ancestry and a lot of them could tell stories about their lineage, especially my Jewish girlfriends. And I learned a lot from that and I got invited into some of their inner circles, invited to parties and celebrations and it really struck me and it was something I wish I understood about myself. Goal DIGGERS came out of that feeling. When I went to college I gained access to something my girlfriends knew since they were born -- I went to a historically black university and I was able to get that knowledge from classes. It made me want to know more.
BV: What were some of the strengths of the girls you grew up with in Park Heights?
MFS: They were resilient, you could not shake them. That's why I wanted to create Goal DIGGERS, because my girls in the city have become beyond resilient, they're apathetic. And the apathy was just destroying me, watching their bright eyes being destroyed because of what they were being thrown into so early. They are having to reconcile all of these adult issues so early and then on top of that not having an identity, not being real clear where you come from. And that, that some place is a place to be recognized and celebrated. Why should they have to wait another year, another moment, until they have an HBCU experience? What if it never comes, how can we handle that, and so Goal DIGGERS was born.
BV: Why did you focus on girls?
MFS: Girls are the first teachers, and because they can give life, they can also take life away. I've seen mothers suck the life out of their daughters and out of their sons, so if we can get the girls straight, then the boys will have to man up. They will lift up the standard. If they can see themselves as a goal digger -- if they can see themselves in that regard -- they will show up differently and that will shift the paradigm. I know it sounds altruistic, but I think if you get the girls right, the boys will follow. They show up and they're confident and consistent and they have things that they want to do. And the boys are, like, I respect your hustle, I respect your flow.
BV: How did you find the girls?
MFS: In my proposal I proposed it would be 15 girls and I thought it was a good number for one-on-one face time. We did outreach to schools in Park Heights with assemblies presenting the Goal DIGGERS program. From those outreach opportunities, we offered them the opportunity to come to the open house to register. We then interviewed them and their parents or legal guardians.
The zip code in Park Heights, 21215, has a higher disparity than any other zip code in Baltimore for sentencing, dropouts, teen pregnancy, they are less likely to vote, less likely to go to college, all kinds of numbers that come out of that zip code. We did want to take girls that may not have this opportunity for intercontinental travel and being in a full-length documentary at the end of this. I think a lot of them probably would not have traveled intercontinentally, let alone, leave Park Heights.
My intention is to create an institution that cannot be debunked, that if you take a girl, expose her and then your pour into her and show her who she really is -- and in the process you get a chance to spend face time with her and teach her things that she may not have been able to receive in another setting -- then she will be transformed.
BV: The DNA aspect of the program is incredible.
MFS: They get exposed to three major things that can shift their life and that they can even take an interest in and can go to school for it. They get exposed to anthropology -- we will be using an anthropological approach to doing this, ethnographic research, just a fancy way of saying gathering stories. Secondly, technology. We're taking those stories and inputting them into a database, ancestry.com, and we're going to be able to fill in the blank on where your ancestors are from in the United States -- their ancestors that were slaves. They may say North Carolina, but they don't know their names, their attributes, where they came from. Ancestry.com can tell you that from stories you've gathered from family members.
Lastly, is DNA testing and that will be done by a group called African ancestry. They have the largest database of DNA samples in the world. We will be able to tell them on their maternal side, if they are of African descent, what country they come from, then we can actually study the country, the people, the language, their highest attributes, even their personality traits, their value systems. So now you're not just a girl from West Baltimore, you're not just a girl from Park Heights, you come from Sierra Leone, you're from the Mende people, the same way my Jewish friends would run off, "Well I'm a Polish Jew and my grandmother was from this side of Poland," they would run it down like it was the alphabet.
They will also be privy to a lecture series so they'll be getting lectures by some of the top lecturers in the country. Then we'll travel to West Africa, to Ghana, that will be the last piece.
I am committed to doing this for more than 18 months and my intention is to make it a sustainable program. I'm hoping this will become the national model. It's a huge undertaking. I'm committed to it, just like I'm committed to my children and my husband. If I can do it being the daughter of a teen mother from Park Heights, I'm riding with you. My story is your story.