- This month on The SPARK, our theme is "Shepherding Success".

We'll learn more about a faith-based ministry with an employment program helping justice-involved adults thrive, a nonprofit leveraging the power of rugby for social change and a professional society of local IT leaders introducing youth to stem-related possibilities.

We'll also share a special moment from our SPARK Awards 2021.

- From our very beginnings in 1954, Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance has been built on the values of customer service, leading with integrity, and supporting our community.

We believe in promoting the positives, encouraging engagement and leading by example to power the good.

Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance is honored to be a presenting sponsor of The SPARK.

- (male announcer) Additional funding for The SPARK is provided by ECOP, the Memphis Zoo, My Town Movers, My Town Roofing, My Town Miracles, and by Meritan.

- Ever been excited by a new idea?

Inspired by watching someone lead by example?

When we talk about creating change, we start by sharing the stories of everyday heroes who are making a difference in their own way so we can learn and do the same.

I'm Jeremy Park and this is the SPARK.

They're a faith-based ministry with an employment program leveraging a shepherd's model.

We're here with the Executive Director for Economic Opportunities, fondly known as ECOP, Keusi Donald and Keusi, let's start.

Give us a little bit of history for ECOP.

- Yeah, ECOP's been around 30 plus years.

We're a program of the Memphis Leadership Foundation and for years, we've been an on-the-job training program, but we wanted to increase our impact to direct employment.

So in 2018, we revamped our model to the shepherd model to guaranteed jobs.

- And so when you talk about a shepherd's model, walk us through what that means.

- Yeah, so we place individuals in employment opportunities, but we don't place them in employment opportunities without placing them first in a relationship.

And a relationship is connected to a shepherd.

A shepherd will be a life coach, a mentor, spiritual guide, a support specialist, a trauma counselor and healer, whatever kinda support that individual needs, the shepherds just kind of guides them through the employment process.

- You yourself are a lead shepherd, so you know this firsthand above and beyond being an executive director and so share a little bit of your personal story and why this work is so important.

- Yeah, you know, I spent about eight and a half years of my adult life in prisons and when I was released in 2004, someone mentored and guided me and shepherded me through my reentry process.

And without that, I don't think I would be as successful as I am today.

So we use that same idea, that same philosophy to create impact and it's through relationships, life on life.

- When you talk about the program, give us kind of the timeline in terms of how it works and how the magic is created.

- Yeah, so we model our program after Elements of Effective Practice, the six standards.

And so we start with recruitment, there's screening, there's training and onboarding, but the matching and the placement starts when we connect the individuals coming, looking for a job with our shepherds and at that process, we connect with about 13 employers throughout the city now.

We have about 56 positions, jobs that we can guarantee when somebody comes to us for services.

Each shepherd is assigned to one of those work sites and they learn the work culture and they help the individuals who are being hired, transition into to the work culture.

Someone may have a skillset, but that skillset is transferable, but the mental part and the part of transferring the vision and the paradigm into the work culture is what helps people the most.

- When you look at working with justice-involved adults, talk about how they find you.

So talk about the partnerships and where it starts.

- Yeah, so again, ECOP's been around 30 years, so word of mouth, you know.

Our phone stays ring- We get walk-ins and just phone calls every day of someone who heard about us through somebody else.

But we partner with about 50 agencies throughout the city.

We do a lot of events, job fairs, social media.

So we just try to do everything we can to engage and connect with the community.

- What's been the feedback from the companies that you work with in terms of the ease, but also too the transformation that takes place, not only with the individuals, but also too within their own employees?

- Yeah, oh yeah.

So, often our shepherds act as a chaplain at the work site at different times, but just the shepherd's presence and impact on the employer's work site is tremendous.

And we get a lot of great feedback, a lot of great encouragement from our employer partners about how much they appreciate our shepherds.

And the shepherds actually helps with the onboarding process for each employer, you know.

The shepherd understands the profile of the person they wanna hire, and they just guide 'em through the process and make it a smooth transition.

- And I think that's a powerful piece is they're the mentor and the shepherd for the individual, but also too, they play that role in terms of the collaborator, the convener, the glue for the company as well to make it easy and effective on both sides.

What's success look like on your end with the individuals and the adults?

Talk about what success looks like.

- You know, when someone comes into the program, they fill out a bunch of assessments.

But one of the most important assessments, I believe, is there's an assessment where we gather how many personal, professional, and spiritual goals that individual wants to accomplish.

And shepherds guides them through creating a life plan around those goals and during the process of employment with us, they are accomplishing these goals and they're becoming these goal-oriented individuals most companies and employers are looking for, and it changes the decision-making ability.

So, you know, making better decisions, understanding how to manage their life skills a lot better is the ultimate goal because after that, it's up to that individual, how much success they can find when they can manage their life skills and manage life better than they have in the past.

- I think all of us can understand and appreciate the power of a role model, a mentor, a teacher, a parent.

There are plenty of ways to get involved through obviously being a shepherd and on the company side, plugging into Economic Opportunities, but how can the community help your efforts?

- Yeah, so several ways, you know.

Of course, finances is always a area of support and help, but just connecting us with new employers will be tremendous.

ECOP is about 90, 95 or 90% self-sustaining through the employer-contract relationship.

So if you want to help us, send a referral our way, but also individuals that are out there looking for support, can't seem to find sustainable income, we would love for you to make that referral too.

- So when you mention referring, where do we go?

So mention your website, your social media phone number.

Where do we go to connect in with ECOP?

- For our website, it's ecopmemphis.org.

That's ecopmemphis.org.

You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, as well as Instagram.

- Well Keusi, yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for all you and your amazing team do.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- All right, appreciate this opportunity, Jeremy.

Thank you.

[upbeat music] - They're a nonprofit leveraging rugby for social change.

We're here with the Director of Operations for Memphis Inner City Rugby, Andrea Wensits.

And let's start out, a 10-year milestone.

Give us a little bit of history for the organization.

- Yeah, in 2012, our co-founders Shane Young and Devin O'Brien were Teach for America core members here in Memphis, and they decided to bring rugby to all of our schools here in Memphis.

So they started at Power Center Academy, which was actually a school that I worked at and that's how I met them and Kingsbury High School.

They wanted to just bring a sport that usually is in predominantly white neighborhoods with a lot of privileged youth playing it and bring the sport to Memphis, to bring the power of rugby and love to help our students learn leadership skills, respect on and off the court, and also help them get pathways into college.

So some of our students are currently playing at Ivy League schools.

We have them all throughout the United States and rugby is an opportunity to help our students from Memphis advance their educational goals.

- Talk about the ages served, the number of youth, give us some stats.

- So right now we are currently working at five, we have five high school teams and we are expanding to 10 middle school teams.

Next year, we're looking to serve 315 students in middle school and high school.

We are expanding into pathways, so eventually in two to three years, we will have programming at the elementary, middle, and high school levels so that our students are playing with us throughout their whole entire K-12 career.

And then they graduate into our alumni services.

Right now, next year we will be serving around 30 students in college support where we will help them transition from high school to college, providing them with academic mentors, as well as life skills of like financial workshops and mental health support.

- For those who aren't familiar with rugby, give us some of the very basics in terms of like how many players on a team, what are some of the things we need to know about rugby?

- Yeah, so we have two seasons for rugby.

We have fall is a seven season, so it's seven players on one team, two halves for seven minutes.

And then in the 15 season, there are 15 players on each team and that's in the spring.

That's a lot more intense.

The seven season is very short, quick rugby.

You get a lot of reps.

It's similar to football in ways of where like the whole point is to like run up and down the field and you score, try and score points.

There's a lot of tackling involved, but we don't use any pads.

- And then this is something for both boys and girls.

Talk about the co-ed piece of this.

- Yeah, so Devin and Shane first started this with boys programs.

However, after a few years, one of our school's, Freedom Prep Academy, the girls advocated for their own team, as well as our Power Center Academy girls.

And so from that, the girls were the ones who took the initiative to start a team.

We funded that team and Freedom Prep has been to state championships multiple times.

They're currently coached by one of their own alumni.

So three of our, or we have two high school girls teams right now with quite a few middle school that are very promising and we're looking to continue to build our women in sports.

The majority of our alumni coach, so almost all of our teams are coached by an alumni and the majority of them are women.

So we are seeing a lot of our women get in sport and coach the youth.

- Very cool.

One of the things that makes you unique is a partnership that allows for trauma-informed coaching.

Talk about what that is and why that's so important.

- Yeah, we have partnered with the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport and they have helped us design this curriculum where a lot of our students have undergone traumas just from their background, socioeconomic backgrounds and upbringing.

And from this, we are teaching our coaches how to help our students, how to advocate for our students and also how to just help them navigate life as a being.

We also are partnering since a lot of our coaches are alumni, so they themselves have been through a lot of trauma, putting them in a situation where they then have to coach students who have lived through the same experiences.

We are partnering with Thru The Game, which is another mental health service.

So our coaches are meeting with a therapist every other week to help them talk through all of these changes that they're experiencing, learn new coping mechanisms and techniques, techniques to also help them work with their students and deal with their own trauma.

- Give us some success stories.

Obviously you've had tremendous success.

As an organization, you're also a past honoree of the SPARK Award, so when you look at the life transformation and everything that you're doing, it's extremely powerful, but what does success look like on your end?

- Yeah, I think success is defined in multiple ways.

So an easy way is saying that we currently have quite a few collegiate players playing at Lindenwood University, we have one playing at Dartmouth University, another at Brown and also Life University.

So we have a lot of female athletes getting college scholarships to play rugby at the collegiate level.

Success for me is also defined by keeping our coaches here in Memphis and keeping them engaged and working back with our community.

So one of our coaches, Faith Walker, she played for Freedom Prep Girls.

She is attending the University of Memphis.

She has found a love for coaching, is the head coach of that high school team.

And she is looking to graduate next summer, where she already has a job lined up at Queens University to be a college coach.

So we're seeing success in multiple ways, not just playing rugby, but also getting involved back in our communities.

- How can we help you?

So how can we all help Memphis Inner City Rugby?

- Yeah, one, you can come out to a game and come out and support us.

But we also are having our 10-year anniversary event, which is coming up on October 20th and it will take place at Graceland.

Tickets are on sale now and we would love to get the support of the community to come out, buy tickets, meet some of our alumni, meet some of our students and engage with us.

- Well, then the last question is the easy one.

Where do we go?

So mention your website, social media, where all do we go to learn more and get involved?

- Yeah, you can find us at memphisinnercityrugby.org, and you can also find us on Instagram and Facebook.

- Well, greatly appreciate everything you and your amazing team are doing.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

- Thank you for having me.

[upbeat music] - The SPARK Awards annually recognize and celebrate individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the community.

The 2021 recipient of the Education Educator Award is Allyson Chick of Richland Elementary.

[peaceful music] - My name is Allyson Chick.

I teach at Richland Elementary School.

I have been teaching for 20 years.

I think my favorite part of teaching is the aha moments that students have when they get it, or when they realize they've learned something new and you see that light bulb go off.

It takes so much behind the scenes work in terms of lesson planning and researching and reading and staying up to date on what my students are most interested in.

To switch from in-person to virtual, to hybrid, and back to in-person again, takes a huge shift and sometimes you learn that the way you have always done things isn't the best way.

And so coming out of this in terms of my growth professionally, I've learned so many new ways to reach my students professionally, that my teaching will never be the same.

When we first found out on March 13th, and that date will always be in my mind, and the longer that we were out, the more I kept thinking about, what can I do?

How can I support my students and support their families?

And I was hearing a lot of stories about frontline workers and just how challenging it was for nurses or firemen or police officers.

My little sister, she's a rockstar, Stacy.

She works for a company called On and for the most part you might know On for their shoes, I helped her by finding families that had parents that were firemen, police officers, medical staff, and we were able to provide them new shoes.

Think about how many hours that our medical staff, our nurses, doctors are on their feet and that was just one thing that we could do to help support them.

So it was really so inspiring to think about how just a pair of shoes just brought so much light into their lives, just really made them feel like we were seeing them and knowing how much they were supporting our community.

When we first found out that we were going to come back in-person in a hybrid model, we were concerned with safety measures that we could put in place for our students.

I wrote a grant that was funded by AAA to get shields.

The shields that I was able to get are clear all the way around and are an appropriate size for our little learners so that they can see clearly without any obstructed view and feel safe behind the shield.

I feel like for me to be recognized as a SPARK, I think all teachers deserve this SPARK Award and I feel like I'm accepting this award on behalf of all educators here.

I've seen teachers overcome such challenges, such amazing challenges, to make sure that they were everything that they could be for their students during this difficult time.

I am surrounded by heroes.

- They're a professional society of IT leaders, mentoring and helping youth see the power of STEM-related possibilities.

We're here with Antonio Taylor.

He's the Marketing Chair for SIM-Memphis and Antonio, before we talk about SIM-Memphis, give us a little bit of your background tied to Transnetyx.

- Thank you very much for having me.

So I'm the Director of Technical Services and Infrastructure at Transnetyx.

Transnetyx is the genotyping company.

And my responsibility at Transnetyx is pretty much everything IT infrastructure-related that's cloud, on-premises, server infrastructure, networking, security, and then end user support.

So we stay pretty busy over there at Transnetyx.

- And so your world is IT and very cool when you look at Memphis-based, Mid-South-based company being able to give back and make a difference.

Talk about why this sort of role in giving back is so important to Transnetyx and then we'll talk about SIM-Memphis.

- Well, Transnetyx really believes in building future leaders and we really believe in giving people an opportunity to see something positive they can be that they may not actually see.

We're big in STEM.

We have free labs that are pretty much run by robots.

Those robots are built by our in-house staff.

So it's pretty exciting to have youth come in and tour our facilities and be able to see possibilities that they may not have believed that were afforded to them.

A lot of times when we're in school, we don't think we need science and math and English.

We always say, when are we ever gonna use these?

And we like to bring it to life for the students.

And so it's important to be a part of an organization that's really sincere about helping the community by way of exposure and by way of providing resources in any form that we can to kind of help the youth have a great opportunity for success.

- Absolutely.

So let's talk about SIM-Memphis.

And so talk about what SIM stands for and then we'll dive in deeper.

- So SIM stands for Society of Information Management.

It is a national group, nonprofit organization that's comprised of pretty much IT executive leadership from the C-suite down to directors and some managers.

And so we're the local chapter of SIM here in Memphis.

I serve as you stated as the marketing chair for SIM-Memphis and we really focus our efforts on STEM, outreach networking, and then just kind of developing leaders that are in the workforce to kind of be better at their job and better at what they do.

- Share a little bit about the conferences, the workshops, the peer networking, some of the things, when you talk about the IT executive leadership, talk about that collaboration, then we'll talk about the students.

- So we usually hold monthly meetings every month with our members and potential members as well and we usually have people come in and speak.

And so it's great networking opportunity.

We touch on a variety of topics on those meetings and we just have a very good networking conversation about things that are going on in our local IT community as well as globally, a lot of cybersecurity conversation, things of that nature.

And then we also have our big strategy series, which is in October of this year down at Hilton Memphis.

And we usually have about 300 or so IT executive leaders with partners that help sponsor the event.

And we just come out, we have great keynote speakers that come in and tell stories about team building, about innovation, and things of that nature.

And it's a great opportunity to kind of meet and network with people that you typically wouldn't get a chance to network on a day-to-day basis, and really just kind of pick their brain on what they're seeing in the industry and just kind of gain some knowledge about what we're all trying to do.

I like to tell everybody, no matter if we're competitors or not, IT's still IT, we still use the same switches, route of service, and things of that nature.

So there's no need for us to try to withhold secrets from each other to try to help each other out.

And so it's a good opportunity for us to come together and do some of those things.

- You mentioned cybersecurity, obviously that's a buzzword and a very important thing.

What's maybe one or two other major trend or thing that's really top of mind for you in Transnetyx, but also the IT industry?

- Artificial intelligence.

As we grow in technology, you start seeing things are getting a lot more smarter with cars and like I said, our lab is built and it's run by robots, right?

And 20 years ago, you know, labs and things of that nature were run by human beings.

And so when you think about artificial intelligence and you think about cloud, right, there's a lot of technology now that's no longer on-prem, data centers have gone by the wayside.

People, you know, at first kind of feared the cloud because it's kind of taboo, but I think that's kind of, that cloud has kind of gone away, no pun intended, and people are now a lot more comfortable with moving their data to a location to where somebody else can manage it and support it.

It gives us an opportunity to kind of hire people to utilize their strength and not sit there babysitting servers and things of that nature.

- So we mentioned at the onset, opening the possibilities and the minds of youth, and so you do a lot with youth.

Talk about working with the youth and the students.

- So that's my biggest passion.

And so working with the youth and at Transnetyx, we do a great job of bringing it in, about, man, about 20 to 30 youth.

We try to do it every month, every other month, where we're bringing in, we just have a day at Transnetyx where they come in, they get to tour our labs.

They get to be a part of our company meeting.

And we've got some great partnership with some of our local outreach people here that are doing things such as STS Enterprise, those guys are doing some amazing things and Tech901 and things of that nature that have students, and they have even adults that are in their program that are looking for an opportunity to kind of get their foot in the door.

And so we host them there, we come in, we bring 'em lunch, and one of the great things I love about it is we do our roundtable discussion at the end, where they get to ask questions about, how did you get in your career, or how much money you make, or whatever they're interested in knowing, right?

We get that opportunity to be in that forum and really speak to some of the things that they're passionate about and really more than anything, just to give them that exposure, to show them, hey, these opportunities are out there.

This possibility is real if you really apply yourself and put yourself to good use in your studies in school, the sky's the limit for what you can do.

And so just to see the look on their faces when they're able to look at a robot that they kind of played with in the classroom and see it in real life performing a job, it's one of the most amazing things that I've ever been a part of.

- We'll wrap up with where we go to make that connection and get involved.

- So you can visit us on our website, pull it up here.

Our website is www.chapter.

simnet.org/memphis/home and our strategy series is www.memphisstrategy.com.

You can go to either one of those and sign up to be a sponsor for our strategy series or be an attendee if you're a practitioner and we would love to have you speak more about opportunities.

- Well Antonio, greatly appreciate all you and your team do to give back and make a difference and mentor our youth.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- Thank you very much.

[upbeat music] - When we talk about shepherding success, we're talking about the careful management of people and their futures.

We're talking about mentorship, coaching, communication, protection, and ultimately caring for others.

It's putting someone else first, especially those in our community who often are overlooked, are facing overwhelming challenges, or have never been the priority, who have never before been put first.

In order for our city to thrive, our citizens need to succeed and just like we all need parents, role models, and mentors to help guide us personally and professionally, we need organizations and individuals who are pouring into others and shepherding success in our community.

We're fortunate to have organizations like Economic Opportunities, Memphis Inner City Rugby, and SIM-Memphis, along with companies like Transnetyx that make mentorship and giving back such a priority.

When we take the time to invest in others with our positive energy, we serve as a SPARK, shepherding success for a brighter future ahead.

So thank you for watching the SPARK.

To learn more about each of the guests, to watch past episodes and to share your stories of others leading by example, visit wkno.org and click on the link for the SPARK.

We look forward to seeing you next month.

We hope that you'll continue joining with us to create a SPARK for the Mid-South.

- From our very beginnings in 1954, Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance has been built on the values of customer service, leading with integrity and supporting our community.

We believe in promoting the positives, encouraging engagement, and leading by example to power the good.

Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance is honored to be a presenting sponsor of the SPARK.

[upbeat music] [acoustic guitar chords]