The youth love Johnson's flavor

by Eric Woodyard

     

Twenty-seven-year-old Joe Johnson believes that when it comes to counseling young people, children like to talk to someone who can understand their everyday struggles.

Johnson has had his share of everyday struggles, from facing street violence to being among friends who didn’t even consider attending college. Now that he’s made it through those tough childhood years, Johnson wants to do what he can to make sure that the next generation of children don’t have to face as many struggles as he did.

“I’ve been through the heating the house with the stove, lights being off, no hot water, running because guys are shooting and I’ve had a pistol pointed at my head,” Johnson says. “So a lot of the stuff that they go through I have been there before and you get a lot of counselors who just don’t understand the kids and with me going through that, it’s just that much easier to deal with the kids. I can relate with them and just be a little more real with them.”

Johnson is working to ensure that at-risk youth get to college. He holds three positions centered around helping children in the community to not only stay in school, but to also do well. He works as a youth counselor in the Bangor public schools, as a counselor at the Washington Writers’ Academy Elementary School, and he also studies the issues confronting at-risk youth at the Lewis Walker Institute for Race and Ethnicity at Western Michigan University.

“I provide leadership for everybody in the community, especially the children in the low-income neighborhoods,” Johnson says. “My goal is to go down there and show these kids that they can become somebody and be that extra little boost because some of them don’t have the family and the friends to help them get to where they want to be.”

Born in Milwaukee, Wisc.,  Johnson says his parents taught him the importance of caring for children. His mother taught Johnson and his two younger siblings, Shay and Marcus, how to show compassion and how to be understanding to children in need of attention.

“Our mother was a foster parent, so we always had other siblings who weren’t really our siblings but we considered them as our brothers and sisters,” Johnson’s sister, Shay says. “They were all going through different problems both mentally and physically and that may have helped Joe to see what they were going through and naturally made him want to help kids and he’s good at it.”

Johnson’s foster siblings aren’t much different from the children that Johnson works with today. The children who see only about 50 percent of their peers graduate from high school, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The same children who make up the numbers that mean Kalamazoo is tied with Flint for Michigan’s largest poverty rate, at 48 percent, according to the private studies done at the Lewis Walker Institute. The same children who, thanks to the Kalamazoo Promise, are now attending college – but with little knowledge of how to succeed in the college atmosphere.

Johnson

This 5-11, 215 pound, former Michigan Technological University/Saginaw Valley State Tailback knows these statistics too well because he studies them at WMU’s Lewis Walker Institute. He studies both the race and ethnic relations statistics and then tries to improve these numbers as a GEAR UP counselor in the Bangor area school district, about ten minutes from South Haven, Mich.

GEAR UP stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. This is a grant program designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.
“I was working out in Bangor with sixth through eighth graders but not now I’m working with ninth graders on up,” Johnson says. “Some of them are maybe 20 or 21 (years old) and they’re still working on getting their credits to graduate (high school).”
He has been doing this for the past three years while also attending graduate school at WMU for his counseling degree. After getting his bachelor’s degree in general business, he realized that working with kids was his calling and it was no particular moment when this happened. It just happened, according to Johnson.

“He has a unique ability to reach kids by being real with them and the fact that he was an athlete makes him a role model because the kids can see what he’s done in his life,” Bangor GEAR UP supervisor Sheryl Scott says. “He worked with a very diverse group of children that were mostly African-American, Caucasian and Hispanic and he also diversified our staff because there really are a lower percentage of African-American counselors.”
 

In the past the 5-11, 215 pound Johnson was focused solely on football, but he now devotes all of his energy into the youth’s progression. He also works with the children on the Southside of Kalamazoo as a pre-intern counselor at the Washington Writers’ Academy. 
Johnson was also involved with Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U) Program. The Y.O.U Program works with over 500 youth in the Kalamazoo community. This past summer Johnson worked with 15 high school students from the Kalamazoo community, which he recruited. They were taught the necessary skills of how to grow as individuals as well as how operate the video equipment on WMU’s campus. Johnson along with students from WMU’s School of Communication is currently in the process of finishing documentaries which were created by the 15 youth from Y.O.U. this past summer. Some of the issues in these documentaries focused on different neighborhoods within the city Kalamazoo, education, teenage violence, and the Kalamazoo Promise.
  

“He helps me out with school and my social life and when I’m not at work or at Y.O.U to be more professional by being a young lady,” 15-year-old Kalamazoo Central Y.O.U student Trenae Dunigan says. “I’ve seen myself grow a lot and I’ve seen myself mature and make better decisions and he taught me to have a level head and to think things through before I do them.”
 

Johnson can relate to Dunigan because he has seen himself mature and make wiser decisions.
 

Johnson’s is willingness to commit to the youth even when he is at fault is also one of his gifts. This is why his business card states that he’s “ALL ABOUT THE YOUTH.” He says that he does things for the simple fact that he is trying to help others and he has lofty expectations for the next chapter in his life when he plans to open up his own youth center.

“What separates him from everyone is that he’s actually experienced certain situations that the kids may be going through,” Shay Johnson says. “This makes him able to help anybody but he is really gifted in helping kids because he finds solutions.”