Have you ever asked yourself, “What is my purpose?” I have always asked myself this question since high school and all the more so when I first came to prison. I believe we all have a purpose in any circumstance and stage in life, and I do not want to miss out.
That’s why I founded an organization called Challenging and Helping Adolescents Navigate Change by Educating for Success (CHANCES) in September 2019.
CHANCES came about because I was part of a youth diversion program for four years at another prison, and it is there where I truly found my passion and purpose in life. The program participants work with high schools and youth programs. Students would come for a tour of the prison, and we would give a presentation.
When I was first asked to be involved, I hesitated because I didn’t like public speaking. But I love challenges. I was also able to relate with the youth because I was a youth offender myself.
I initially started participating for the wrong reasons. My thought process was that I would just be involved for a while, receive my certificate and jump to the next class. Little did I know this was not a 10- to 20-week course, but a never-ending program offering no certificates.
Three years into it, during one particular presentation, I met 15-year-old Kyle and 16-year-old Tim, who changed my life forever.
Before this presentation, I was feeling like I wasn’t making an impact. I was very close to dropping out until these two young men came into my life. After the presentation, the probation officer thanked me and said I had an impact on Kyle and Tim. I will never forget that feeling to know that my labor was not in vain. I felt rich.
It’s why I created CHANCES, because I wanted to continue to give back to the youth. The program was approved by the administration in January 2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic. We were unable to have visitors, so we improvised and created a distance-learning curriculum.
I started a newsletter with my partner Juan Gamez, called “Caution: You may have to take some CHANCES,” with the blessing of the prison staff. Juan had come up with the idea for it as a way of sharing our life lessons with youth we can’t reach directly.
The newsletter has been worth all the work we put in. Last summer, for example, our issue addressed the topic, “The Irony of Gang or Gang-Banging.” Eleven people, including ourselves, wrote about the topic. We’ve received a lot of results and praise from prison staff, the youth themselves and probation officers about the newsletter. It’s been going since 2020.
Youth are our future. That is the reason why I want to have my own youth ministry upon my release. I can empathize with the youth because of what I lacked and experienced growing up. I wish there had been a program like mine where incarcerated men could have reached out to me and shared their experiences so I wouldn’t have come to prison.
