“For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit." - Luke 6:43
Man Class
The basic building block for both of our current initiatives and any future plans will be our "Man Class". We believe that the present definition of a man in many of our communities is distorted and perverted. For too many in our community men are portrayed as not willing to be employed, not willing to obey laws, and not willing to take responsibility for their children. It is not surprising when one considers that for the last few generations a lot of our young men have not had the direction, influence, and discipline of a father in their lives. Men learn to be men from being around and watching other men, without that role model many of our young men are left to the caricatures found in the media or from their peers many of whom also have not had a positive father figure in their lives.
We believe it will be vital to the success of any efforts to demolish these false definitions and begin to replace them with positive definitions of what a true man represents. We should not continue to allow these distortions to go unchallenged in our community. Can a bad man become a good father? In our opinion the answer is simple unless you develop a good man you cannot develop a good father, a bad man cannot be a good father.
The goal of the man class will be to pull down those false portrayals of manhood and replace them over time with responsibility and commitment. We should not view this as an opportunity to shame bad men into becoming good men, in stead we view it as taking untrained men and training them to become better parents. So often we expect people who are untrained in an area to perform as if they were trained and this is a misconception. If a person does not know how to do something or has never been taught it is a travesty to expect them to be able to do it. Many in our society falsely believe that we are all running off of the same playbook and that the incentives from one community should work in all communities and when they don't it is because the people are bad. In stead we believe that if a person's life experiences are different then their reality will be different and we have to account for those differences when we craft initiatives to combat certain problems.
We hope to provide untrained men with the skills they need to become life long partners in their childrens lives. The "man class" is the beginning of that process.