It DATES BACK TO…

BY BRYAN KELLY, FOUNDER

The origins of Onawa date back to my first years working with inner city kids in Montgomery’s westside. In 2006, I founded Common Ground Montgomery, a non-profit youth and community organization, and moved my family into a disadvantaged and under-resourced neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama. The years to follow would prove to be highly challenging but rewarding.

I witnessed firsthand the hopelessness, loneliness, and group-think that happens in the neighborhood when kids are isolated in communities of poverty and violence, especially apart from positive male role models. Youth murders, generational poverty, chronic under-employment, teenage pregnancy, and lack of access to quality education is intensified in this type of isolation.

I have attended too many funerals of teenagers that had once, while they were younger, played basketball in my backyard or spent the night as friends of my own children. Over the years, an alarming percentages of kids have revealed traumatic sexual abuse and violence in their earliest years of memory. We watched as light and adventure disappeared from their eyes as they hit middle school age and the distant emotionless demeanor set in as they suppressed trauma and hopelessness knowing that many kids won’t see the age of 21 in neighborhoods like ours.

I also noticed a second, negative isolation. In the heart of this civil rights defining city, kids were now being raised segregated all over again. Schools, neighborhoods, churches, sports teams, and leagues all were disproportionately separated by race and income. Growing up in this type of isolation eats away at the necessary love, respect, and empathy that healthy communities and individuals need.

White kids with more economic means were growing up never really knowing black kids in a city where more than half the population is African American. Many of those kids with economic and social network privilege were also growing up with deep pain and high degrees of destructive secrets of their own as the relationships in their lives were unhealthy as well. Both of these types of isolation are destructive, but also create a poverty, or lack, for everyone involved.

Kids are at a tremendous deficit by missing out on the healthy respect, connection, and education that come from being together with kids from different experiences and backgrounds.

I believe that the future of our families and community are at stake.

I also noticed a third type of isolation. Kids were growing up in the streets and had no real concept of enjoying the outdoors. The neighborhood was riddled with litter and vandalized property, which was symptomatic of the lack of ownership and respect showing little or no respect of nature or stewardship over their own community. Chaos, blight, and disrespect went hand-in-hand with isolation and community and personal trauma.

Our vision is to make this type of experience a reality for kids who would never have access, and allow them to learn to enjoy, develop, and respect nature together with connection to kids from different backgrounds.

THE PLOT TURN…

In 2007, We took 20 boys to North Carolina for a week-long outdoor adventure camp. It was shocking to learn that most of the boys had never been out of the neighborhood much less out in nature. The boys struggled with home sickness and anxiety at first, but it was overcome as they experienced the wonders of nature and camaraderie with other boys not from their neighborhood in a beautiful and challenging week at camp.

Over a decade later, these now men still talk about that summer as a life-changing event. One of the young men, Aaron, is now an avid fisherman and hiker, and takes youth from his neighborhood on outdoor trips to help give them a glimpse of life outside and away from their troubles at home. Now in his early twenties and four years into a successfully career position at a prominent company shares:

"It affected me a lot, memories to this day, I remember the smallest details, it was so enriching for me. I never really cared to help others, but camp brought some of that teamwork and positivity in my heart. It set a new trend for me, to care and help others and care about their success. It made me look at life differently. The destructive stuff in our neighborhood was all we knew. I feel like I would still be running the streets right now, stuck in the same way of thinking and living if not for the people that I met who took me to and who spent time with me at camp, and the kids I got to know outside of my community. I love the outdoors now. It’s a whole other world that I was exposed to and I love to take other kids on adventures now. It, and the people who led me there and poured into me, changed me forever.”

Another young man, DreQuan, who was 10 years old when he went to his first of many camps with us, shares:

“Growing up in the hood, everybody is doing the same thing. Often times you have family members selling drugs, robbing, fighting, getting killed (as his older brother did while robbing a local store) running with gangs and its the same story year after year. Getting to see, feel, smell, hear, and do different things in nature is so freeing. We need different experiences to learn how to bond with nature and with others. You get so many mixed messages from the hood, but you really get shown love and respect in a camp experience. Genuine love is what I saw at camp, in the bonding, in the leadership, facing our fears, accomplishing things I didn’t think I could accomplish. It showed me that I could do that in life. It breaks up the norm and helped me to see that there is so much more. I went to a place that I enjoyed and it taught me so many things about life, about beauty, and about getting a clear direction for my life. Camp played a big part in me wanting to grow and accomplish things I didn’t think were possible for kids like me.”

DreQuan now works in the non-profit field and has taken many kids from his community to camp as a leader and owns his own small business.