On this monthly radio program, The Children’s Foundation President and CEO Larry Burns talks to community, government and business leaders about issues related to children’s health and wellness.
Guests for this discussion were Nicole McKinney, Executive Director, Friends of the Children–Detroit; Kevin Roach, CEO, Methodist Children’s Home Society; and Cheryl Johnson, CEO, COTS.
The hour-long show typically airs at 7 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month on WJR 760AM. Here’s a summary of the show that aired February 24, 2021; listen to the entire episode, and archived episodes, at yourchildrensfoundation.org/caring-for-kids.
Larry Burns: Tell us about Friends of the Children.
Nicole McKinney: We are a new nonprofit mentoring organization that launched in January 2020. We’re a part of a national network of 22 chapters. Our goal is to end generational poverty; we do that in a very unique way, using a model that has proven success. We pair mentors one-to-one with vulnerable children. We use paid, professional mentors and they mentor a child from the age of four to six years until they graduate from high school. We have three long-term outcomes in mind: to ensure that our children graduate from high school or obtain a GED, that they stay away from the juvenile justice system, and that we prevent teen pregnancy.
Burns: How has the pandemic impacted you and how have you adjusted?
McKinney: Typically, our model is in-person mentoring. We had to adapt our model to a virtual environment and it actually created an opportunity for us. We’ve been able to do some group mentoring, bringing families together, that we wouldn’t have done otherwise. Our mentors are able to Zoom into some of the classes with their students, which helps to increase attendance.
Burns: How has the grant from The Children’s Foundation helped?
McKinney: We received a $40,000 grant from The Children’s Foundation to provide technology support and help meet basic needs. Our families were struggling with the virtual learning environment, so we were able to provide laptops to the children and boosters for better Wi-Fi access.
Burns: Has the importance of resiliency factored into what your mentors do?
McKinney: Our caregivers use an app that we’re piloting called MentorHub. It helps them to check in on mental wellness. Our mentors are using reading enrichment activities with the children, trying to help fill any gaps in their learning through the virtual environment. There are five roadmap goals that we track in our efforts-to-outcome database: school success, pro-social development, improved health, making good choices and plans/skills for the future.
Burns: What do you see in the future for Friends of the Children–Detroit?
McKinney: Each year our plan is to add an additional cohort. We work with cohorts of 32 children. This year we’ll have a total of 64 children. We also support the caregivers of those children. We raised the $1.5 million that was needed to bring a chapter to Detroit; it is up to the community now to sustain it.
Burns: You follow the students from grade to grade so you get to know them well.
McKinney: Typically, a mentor stays five to seven years, and around middle school is when the transition happens when the child gets a different mentor.
Burns: How can people help?
McKinney: By going to our page at friendsdetroit.org.
Larry Burns: Tell us about your organization.
Kevin Roach: We started over a hundred years ago because of the Spanish Flu as an orphanage-type setting. Through the years we have evolved and grown to provide more than just residential care; we also provide foster care, adoption and transitional living. We made the pivot a couple of years ago to start to focus on our community-based services, looking at child abuse prevention, citizen re-entry, and the intergenerational gap.
We’ve found that many of our children were being cared for by seniors so we added a senior service component. The last piece is embarking on trauma-informed education for our children with a charter school.
Burns: Explain the name and is there still an affiliation with the Methodist church?
Roach: We are nonsectarian, serving people of all backgrounds, all orientations and all faiths. Two of the founders of Methodist Children’s Home Society were devout Methodist women, Anna Kresge, wife of S.S. Kresge, and Sophie Sprague. The name is a nod to those whose shoulders we stand on.
Burns: Tell us about the program that The Children’s Foundation supports.
Roach: Our goal was to be able to leverage that into additional support, to intervene early and offer child abuse prevention services, case management, psychosocial educational empowerment groups and a resource bank, all of which was funded by our partnership with The Children’s Foundation.
Burns: We try to connect our partners with each other. You have space at Durfee with our partner, Life Remodeled.
Roach: I think that when we are in the company of many other great organizations, even better things can happen. In our child abuse prevention program’s first year we served nearly a thousand families and over 98 percent of them did not have child protective services contact or were not involved in the system.
Burns: The Children’s Foundation is much more focused on the family now.
Roach: We’ve come to learn that children are defined by two things—who they love and who loves them. In serving a child without his or her family, we’re doing them a great disservice. We need to figure out how we build up that family unit from a holistic—physical, emotional and mental—standpoint, to ensure that family can achieve all the great things that we know families are capable of achieving.
Burns: What is on your plate for 2021?
Roach: It’s taking on what we believe is a critical crisis facing children in Detroit: their mental health. In the upcoming year, we will continue to grow and serve more children and families and offer some new programs to fill some of the gaps that are in the community.
Larry Burns: Can you give us an overview of COTS?
Cheryl Johnson: We will be 40 years old next year and I’ve had the pleasure of being there for 30 of them. We started as an organization focusing on the needs of all homeless people, doing emergency shelter, transitional and affordable housing. Seven years ago we changed direction because we were seeing generations returning with their children and the generations multiplying, meaning more than two generations coming in together. That was something that we couldn’t tolerate. Now we get people housed.
Burns: How about mental health as it relates to the family unit?
Johnson: We are a trauma-informed organization. We lead from that. Understanding that over their lives—not only children, but adults that come through our doors—they have just been exposed to so much trauma. That impacts their ability to think, their executive functioning skills. It impacts their emotions. Now we are in the middle of a pandemic. You see domestic violence on the rise, you see suicide attempts by children. We work with the entire family, to make sure we are responding immediately and have resources not only on-site, but also through referrals to appropriate places for help. That has been an uptick for us and we are seeing the positive outcomes for our families.
Burns: You recently had a virtual special event, Soup City.
Johnson: It was a celebratory evening and believe it or not, the party is still going on. This was the first year we did it virtually. We were able to introduce our families to a larger audience and focus on their triumphs, both the things that they have worked through and the wonderful things they’re doing right now. People can come to our website to still have access to that great evening and enjoy it at cotsdetroit.org.
Burns: What’s on the horizon for COTS? You’re going to be meeting with some of my colleagues on the grant side soon and I’m hoping that you become a partner of ours.
Johnson: We are really excited about the future. We are also excited about Peterboro Arms opening up downtown. This is brand new, affordable housing for our families. We’re looking at expanding that, because one of the things that’s so necessary to stabilize our families is affordable housing.
Burns: Tell us more about that. Where is it located?
It’s at 26 Peterboro. It used to be the Imperial Hotel back in the 1920s and was our headquarters for a number of years. It has a beautiful, marble floored lobby with a piano that was donated by a wonderful donor, and colorful furniture in all of the apartments, which are two and three bedrooms, fully furnished. Our families are moving into a turnkey apartment with all kinds of amenities for them. They can walk down the street to Campus Martius or walk over to Whole Foods.
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