00:00It's me, Gene, and Shannon Renee. The holidays are right around the corner, and we have teamed up with a really dope organization and First State Bank to help disadvantaged teens this holiday season.
00:11Yes, we're partnering with TCB Youth Mentoring, and today we're here with Tommy Barnes, and he is the president and founder of the Youth Mentoring Program. Hi.
00:20Hi, how are you?
00:21Good. First of all, let me say that a lot of times during the holidays, the age range that we focus on are kids that are younger than teens, so there's this little slot there that teenagers kind of get overlooked, and that's the need that we're trying to fill for this year.
00:37Yeah, and that's kind of the whole mission statement of your organization, right, Tommy?
00:41Yes, sir.
00:42So talk to us a little bit about why you thought this was an important cause to take up.
00:46Well, the COVID-19 pandemic had damaging effects on our youth mentoring program.
00:51You know, being in quarantine for almost 100 days and not being able to really physically interact with the kids, we've seen that some of their financial situations became exacerbated.
01:03They didn't have access to resources for education or opportunity during COVID, so our team jumped into action thinking,
01:11what could we do to kind of salvage the holiday season in a time of real uncertainty?
01:17So we got busy.
01:18I started volunteering with the Marine Corps in their Toys for Tots program.
01:21So I spent probably about 15 hours a day at Selfridge Air National Guard Base with the Marines working through Toys for Tots.
01:29At the same time, I realized in the first week that I was volunteering with Toys for Tots that they stopped servicing kids at age 13.
01:36Well, being a youth mentor for almost 25 years, I realized that when you really begin to realize that poverty has beset your life is when you're a teenager, right?
01:47For a little kid, you can go out and buy them a bunch of toys from the dollar store and they're none the wiser, right?
01:52You put them in a bunch of different packages.
01:54They're wrapping paper, playing with wrapping paper.
01:56Little kids don't care.
01:57Right.
01:57But when you're 15 and everybody got a new iPhone for Christmas and your parents live in poverty and you woke up to nothing,
02:04that starts to put you on a path towards embarking on dangerous behaviors because you feel like nobody's seeing you, no one's hearing you.
02:12So our organization jumped into battle and said, look, these are the people that we want to advocate for.
02:18That 13 to 19-year-old age group, the kids who are the forgottens, the kids who nobody is thinking about during the holiday season.
02:25Got you.
02:26And so how long has it been since you kind of started this program and started focusing on that 13 to 19 age range?
02:33Well, it was great.
02:33So our youth mentoring program, I started this when I was 19 years old.
02:37So I've been doing this for almost 25 years.
02:39Wow.
02:40But our Christmas program started right as the pandemic began.
02:44It started in 2020.
02:47We ran the program with only $5,000 in donations.
02:51The second year, we made it to almost $20,000 in donations.
02:54Last year, we had almost $35,000 in donations.
03:00Imagine how many kids that's able to help.
03:02Yeah.
03:02Because for teenagers, we all know teenagers don't want gifts that come, you know, like, come on, let's be honest, right?
03:08Most 13, 14, 15-year-olds, they want that new iPhone.
03:12They want those new Jordans.
03:13They want that new Nike tech outfit that mom can't really afford that's $300, right?
03:18But that thing makes them feel whole when they go back to school again.
03:22Remember being a kid in high school, being bullied, people picking on you about your shoes or the way you smell or whatever?
03:28Teenagers are faced with enough every day.
03:31And after COVID, knowing that, like, for me and my family, we haven't celebrated a Christmas together since COVID started.
03:37Wow.
03:37So just imagine that.
03:39In 2020, everybody in my family was afraid of COVID, didn't want to get together.
03:44In 2021 and 2022, both me and my wife both had COVID during the holiday season.
03:49Oh, no.
03:49So we haven't actually had a family Christmas since COVID began.
03:53But for every single year, we have brought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources back to our community to help kids and families in need during the pandemic and during the holiday season.
04:04So this is a real close issue to my heart because I understand that if kids wake up Christmas morning and don't feel the love that the rest of us feel on Christmas, they start exhibiting those dangerous behaviors.
04:16Those dangerous behaviors could then come back on us.
04:20It's just regular members of the community because when it's nobody's problem, it's everybody's problem.
04:25So let me ask you, how many teens have you mentored through your program over the years?
04:31Do you have a number?
04:32It's countless.
04:33There are so many kids that have been affected by our program.
04:36We started off running an after-school program with the Macomb Daily.
04:40There's a bunch of kids going out and knocking on doors, signing people up for the newspaper.
04:44That became an economic multiplier for a lot of these teens who are living in poverty.
04:49You know, kids were all signing people up for the newspaper, making $200 and $300 a week.
04:52That, you know, $900 to $1,200 a month coming into that house, that new revenue helped their family pull them out of poverty.
05:02After when COVID hit, everything that we did with our business model and our after-school program had to change.
05:08We took on a community center in Mount Clemens.
05:10We partnered with the city of Mount Clemens to bring in resources to the area that I live in and the area that I'm passionate about.
05:16But our wider footprint of being able to affect all these kids have been damaged after COVID.
05:21So the way that we felt to give back was to go and help the families during the holidays.
05:28That seems to be the time when everybody's up against it.
05:30Like, we all look at the holidays as this great time that we get to celebrate together.
05:35But there are a lot of people who spend those holidays alone.
05:37And if you talk to people and, you know, if you talk to first responders and EMS people,
05:41a lot of times that's when they see the largest influx of patients is during the holidays because people are alone and they're sad.
05:48Why are we doing that to our most vulnerable kids?
05:51Those kids that are 13 and 19, they live in poverty, they're Macomb, Oakland, Wayne County residents.
05:57These kids are just looking for a hand up, somebody to say they care about them.
06:01But that's what we do.
06:02We partnered with a slurry of different people throughout the county to bring this program to life.
06:09But every year that we get these giant checks, we take a group of teenagers together and we go to the Foot Locker at 8 Mile and Kelly and East Point.
06:19And we spend three or four hours with teenagers actually shopping for other kids.
06:24So they know what the kids want.
06:27They get a list of kids that they have to buy for and they go in and put these care packages together.
06:33We go back to the community center.
06:35They wrap the presents for the kids.
06:37They are hands on.
06:39This is a peer to peer model where we're teaching kids to take care of the kids.
06:43I love to hear that.
06:44That is really cool, man.
06:45So talk to us about your partnership with First State Bank.
06:49Oh, my goodness.
06:50First State Bank has been amazing from the beginning.
06:53Our partnership with First State Bank happened when our organization won their annual Banksgiving contest.
07:00We wanted to rehabilitate a kickball field in the city of Mount Clemens.
07:05We applied for First State Bank's Banksgiving program and actually became a $5,000 winner of the Banksgiving program.
07:12We have had a wonderful relationship with them since then.
07:16Our partnership with another nonprofit called Advancing Macomb and First State Bank helped us to bring to life a splash.
07:23It's almost a half a million dollar new investment between a group of nonprofits in the city of Mount Clemens to bring a splash pad to a neighborhood who hadn't seen any new economic investment in almost 25 years.
07:36Wow.
07:37That's the kind of stuff that First State Bank is doing in our community and the kind of footprint that they've had.
07:43Since we started this program in 2020, Amy Pearson and all of the wonderful people at First State Bank have been instrumental in making sure that they supported this program.
07:54Last year, the employees at First State Bank put us in a contest where they voted on donating money to us as a charity.
08:03And during annual gala event in January, Amy and I sat down and talked about how she had this great idea for this program.
08:12First State Bank has been a real community partner.
08:14When you're talking about banking and somebody really that's there to look out for the community,
08:18like I know a lot of people sell those wolf tickets, but First State Bank really puts their money where their mouth is.
08:23Well, I can tell you behind the scenes, we've had meetings with them and they speak so highly of you and the work that you do in the community
08:30and how passionate they are to make sure that you are taken care of.
08:34So know that when you say that about them, we've seen it behind the scenes.
08:40They very much do care about community and your organization as well.
08:45And we've met with them and they've talked about some of their other programs that they have about budgeting and managing your money
08:51and free resources that they've got for people in the community.
08:54So it's great to hear that a lot of people say it, right?
08:57And a lot of people do it because they have to, but you can tell that they're doing it because they want to do it and they want to help.
09:03So it's awesome to hear that the partnership between you and the bank is a solid one that's kind of helping your organization do some really great things.
09:12And we've partnered with First State Bank and TCB Youth.
09:17And if you want to donate and help out, all you have to do is go to 105onthebounce.com.
09:22There's a link there where you can donate to TCB Youth and help with the program because the holiday season is here.
09:28And like Shannon mentioned earlier, you know, Toys for Tots and a lot of these organizations focus on the younger kids, right?
09:33It's buy a new unwrapped toy.
09:36Well, when you're a teenager, you're not going to give me a Tonka truck and have me be excited about it.
09:40So I'm glad that you have kind of filled in that gap to, you know, help those kids to feel good about themselves as well.
09:48I think on the website, too, you'll be able to view some of the success stories as well.
09:52It's not often that you get to see exactly where your money goes and the end result of what that, you know, what that looks like.
09:58And so we're very, very happy to feature some of the kids on our website as well so that you can see exactly where your money is going.
