People

“I’m not perfect. I’m not smarter than anybody in here,” Miles, a Howard County father and longtime juvenile advocate, says to the more than 50 African-American boys and teens gathered in Baltimore for a Mentoring Male Teens in the Hood monthly meeting. “Realize that everybody has gifts and talents. If you do not sharpen a pencil, it becomes dull. If you do not sharpen a mind, it becomes dull.”

He has the rapt attention of every youngster seated on metal chairs in an upstairs conference room at Coppin State University, just blocks from the many boarded-up rowhouses and trash-filled alleys of west Baltimore. His T-shirt bears the program’s red-lettered slogan: “Failure is Not an Option.”

“There are a lot of good kids out there, and these are some of them,” says Maryland District Court Judge Miriam Hutchins, on hand at a recent meeting to present awards for an essay contest on Reginald Betts’ prison memoir, A Question of Freedom.

Kip Hall, whose 19-year-old daughter is a student at Coppin State, has been a mentor with the program for about seven years and remembers a time when, as a young man, mentors in his Baltimore neighborhood helped keep him on the “straight and narrow.”

“I was a problem child when I was coming through middle school, but I got guidance to help me,” Hall says, recalling mentors who would tell him, “You’re getting in trouble. We ain’t havin’ it.” That early support made him more than willing to help out.

“We, as the men and women of the community, have to touch the young people and talk to them,” Hall says.

Program participant Gerareo Semidui had a defining moment when he was sitting in a holding cell three years ago.

“I was cold,” remembers the now-16-year-old Baltimore boy who has dreams of becoming a sports attorney or a doctor. “I didn’t have anything but a sandwich. I didn’t want that to be my life.”

So he turned back to the program that had helped steer him on the right path. The program rewards participants for good grades—$20 for every “A”—and brings in mentors from all walks of life to show what hard work can do. Among other activities, they’ve visited the shock-trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center; a trip last year to Yale University was many of the boys’ first foray out of Baltimore and first night sleeping in a hotel.

“We take that stuff for granted,” says Miles, who hopes to take the boys on an Atlanta trip this summer and who spends countless hours on the program “because we are losing too many young men to the penal system and the cemetery.”

For more information on Mentoring Male Teens in the Hood, contact Cameron Miles at cmilesmmth@gmail.com or 410-852-8013.