Meet the Bioneers: Will Green
Posted: 2:13PM July 29th, 2011 | Comments
[This is the first in a series of 5 profiles. Each week, we will bring you the story of one of our Bioneers to be honored at this year's Badger Bioneers conference. More information about the November conference will be available on our website throughout the summer.]
Will Green - Founder, Mentoring Positives, Inc.
The hook is the key.
For the last seven years, this has been the motto of Will Green’s Mentoring Positives program. It means that the best way to change a person is by engaging the passions that already drive him or her.
One by one, Green and the small Mentoring Positives volunteer team has been “hooking” at-risk youth in the Darbo-Worthington, Allied Drive, and Southside Penn Park neighborhoods, mainly reaching them through basketball as a model for life.
Muscular and compact, with a shaved head and wearing a sleeveless baggy t-shirt and mesh shorts, Green exudes a kind of coiled-spring energy, like he’s ready to sprint up and down a basketball court for hours. Green, who was a standout player for UW-Eau Claire, knows first-hand the power of a game to inspire.
“I found my savior in basketball,“ Green says. “I was a shy kid, very unsure. The game made me a leader. You can learn so much – competency, anger management, discipline.”
What the game didn’t teach Green, his mother did. He had been working with youth and social workers for several years when his mother died of breast cancer in 2003. He says he felt like he needed to be doing more to pass on her values of family, empathy, and community to kids whose upbringings were less stable than his own, so he quite his job and started Mentoring Positives (and gave it his mom’s initials, M.P.) It is designed to give teens on low-income blocks a chance to work on marketable skills and social behaviors, and counsel and support their parents and families.
Mentoring Positives’ ten mentors currently work with 45 kids aging from 10-years-old to late teens. It has been hailed as “an unbelievable asset” by the Madison Police Department and praised by local parents and officials alike for providing a safe, supportive haven for young men.
The program doesn’t have the reach – or the funding – of large, established mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, but Green says that he’s trying to hook the kids who have behavioral or mental issues that those programs don’t individually address. Yes, he plays basketball with teens, but Green’s mentees talk about life, help each other address family issues, and work through school suspensions.
A small program, focusing on each kid, leads to surprising discoveries. Recently, Green floated the idea to his kids of working in the Darbo Salvation Army community garden.
“The response was totally, ‘Hell no, I ain’t going out in a garden,’” chuckles Green. “But then we helped them start thinking about the ways the garden could be a project they’d get excited about.”
The result is “Off the Block Salsa,” a potential money-maker, and a product grown – with a label designed and a business plan executed – by some of the MP mentees.
Some of these mentees have gone off to college, many have not. Some last with the program for six years; some last for six days. But Green is committed to making sure that each kid referred into his program gets the attention they can’t seem to get elsewhere.
“One of the kids, the hardest nut to crack this summer, he’s sixteen. He takes a cab half way across town to be here,” says Green, who sometimes seems genuinely surprised at his program’s successes.
“Now he’s beating us here in the mornings.”
He’s hooked.
