“Be a leader, not a follower. That’s what my mom used to tell me back when I was a kid growing up in the Tri-Taylor/North Lawndale neighborhood. My family was very protective of me and Midtown kept me out of trouble also.
“Once I was talking with a group of guys in the program about colleges. I hadn’t thought much about college yet and one of the older guys mentioned Benedictine University. I said I had never even heard of the place. One advisor told me, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter if you never heard of it. It might be a great place for you.’ And years later, he was right. That’s where I went for my undergraduate degree. “Midtown gives kids a chance to see what’s out there in the world.”
“The thing I remember about Metro is how the advisors always had a kind of personal touch. They would check in with me every week and ask me about how my life was going. My advisor would even ask me things like, ‘How’s your new dog?’ And she came to visit me at home with my family. “I used to be shy when I was a kid just taking the Metro van in from our neighborhood, Brighton Park. But Metro even got me out of my shyness. In one English class, we had to take turns standing at the front of the class and singing a song—to win a candy bar. It worked! It gave me confidence that I use in my job today. “I came to realize that Metro was supporting the same things my own family believed in—the importance of education and learning to help others.”
“I guess I came from a famous neighborhood. In Humboldt Park we invented the drive-by shooting, or at least perfected it. Gangs were a dominating presence in the neighborhood and claimed a lot of good young people. I’m talking about buddies whom you grow up playing baseball with in the alley or on the street. Then they make a series of bad decisions and are pulled away from sports and into guns or drugs – gangs.
“I had a cousin who went to Metro, so I started riding the bus from North Lawndale to the Center. One reason I needed Metro was because I had just made an ‘F’ in math. My math tutor there gave me a lot of confidence in solving problems and the next quarter, I made an ‘A’. That’s my grandma’s favorite Metro story.
web.png "Anthony Partee - then")
A Chance to See What’s Out Thereweb.png "Celia Gonzalez - then")
A Personal Touchweb.png "Jim Palos - then")
Helping Kids “See Down the Road”web.jpg "Tiffany Burkett - then")
The Best Lesson - Personal Example