- This month on The Spark, our theme is "Unlocking Potential".

We'll learn about an organization enhancing post-secondary opportunities and building Tennessee's future workforce, one student at a time, a nonprofit focused on providing mentors and structured programming to support fourth graders in economically disadvantaged schools and a nonprofit with a playbook using targeted literacy, health and wellness programs to prepare youth for success.

We'll also share a special moment from our Spark Awards 2024.

- From Higginbotham's founding in 1948, our insurance agency 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.

Higginbotham Insurance and Financial Services is honored to be the presenting sponsor of The Spark.

- (male announcer) Additional funding for The Spark is provided by United Way of the Mid-South, EcOp, the Memphis Zoo, My Town Movers, My Town Roofing, First Tee Tennessee-Memphis, and by the Medical Education and Research Institute.

- Have you 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 an organization enhancing post-secondary opportunities and building Tennessee's future workforce one student at a time.

We're here with Graham Thomas, he is the Chief Community and Government Affairs Officer with tnAchieves and let's start out, give us a little background, a little history for tnAchieves.

- Yeah, Jeremy, thanks so much for having me today.

tnAchieves is a 501[c][3] nonprofit.

What we're best known for is operating the Tennessee Promise across the state and what that means is that we provide supports for students that are using the Tennessee Promise Scholarship.

A large percentage of our students tend to be the first in their family to go to college, tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and so we have a volunteer mentorship program to support them as they're graduating from high school and transitioning to college and then we have a full team here that coaches our students through college.

We have some additional grant funding to help support the things that Tennessee Promise doesn't cover, but we're here to make sure that students are successful as they're going on their post-secondary journey.

- And you've recently surpassed a major milestone, so talk about that.

- We have, we now have more than 50,000 college graduates.

When we started this work, if you were a student that was receiving a Pell Grant, going to college at one of our community colleges, your graduation rate was less than 10% and we've moved it to almost 50%.

So moved that graduation rate significantly and now we're starting to see the graduates out in the workforce.

We've done some math and it looks like we've had about a $42.6 billion economic impact on our state with those 53,000 plus graduates now.

- You make it very easy when it comes to the mentorship.

Talk about what it means to be a mentor and how that works.

- Yeah, you know, I think everyone needs someone in their corner, right?

If you've ever been to college before, you know that it gets hard.

If you were like me, you weren't a very good math student.

Other students struggle writing papers.

We have other students that are doing just fine in the classroom, but the life stuff is getting in the way and so we go out and find 5,000 people across the state every year to sit in the student's corner and say, "Hey, college is attainable "and you can do this.

"I'm gonna go on this journey with you.

"I'm gonna help answer your questions.

I'm gonna help you navigate this process."

If you're the first person in your family that's ever been to college, it's a new vocabulary, it's a new process.

We have students that show up on the first day of college like they do in high school and think that someone's gonna tell 'em where to go and they didn't go to orientation, they didn't register for classes, they didn't make an advising appointment and so our mentors are working with our students to eliminate all those barriers.

We get asked all the time, like if you had a magic wand and you could fix higher Ed, like it's really hard to access.

It's really easy to leave.

You wake up one morning, decide you're not going back and that's it and so we've got a team of people now, both volunteers and staff that are checking in on students, making sure, one, they find themselves on a college campus and two, that we can keep them there once they're enrolled.

- You have a new workforce mentorship program as well.

Talk about that new program.

- Really excited about this.

It is brand new.

We are pairing our students that are approaching graduation with a volunteer and we're going less, we're not using geography as much as we are using our mentors, our volunteers' expertise.

So if we have a student that wants to go into nursing, we're gonna pair them up with a volunteer that's a nurse and this volunteer, this mentor can help them navigate their first job.

Where to apply?

How to build a resume?

What an interview is going to look like and we're gonna do that across all the fields and all the majors.

If you're a business person, we're gonna put you with a business student.

If you're a teacher, we're gonna put you with a teacher, another popular and in-demand major with our students.

So, what we think we're gonna do there is really help students navigate their first job, make sure that they're getting employed somewhere where they will have a livable wage where they can support themselves and somewhere down the road, support their families.

We know that almost 85% of our graduates stay in Tennessee to live, work and raise a family.

We wanna make sure that they're accessing these viable career options.

- Talk about what it means to be a mentor, how easy it is, you alluded to it before, but dive in, especially when it comes this workforce initiative.

- Yeah, we're only asking mentors for about one hour per month to work with a small group of two or three students, again, in your career field.

So it should be a subject matter that you're already familiar with and then our team is here to support you.

We know that if you as a mentor are reaching out to us and the staff with a question, it's because a student reached out to you and so you get our personal cell phone numbers, obviously our emails and if you text me at 7:30 on a Tuesday night, I'm gonna reply back, hopefully at 7:32, I got a toddler running around here these days, so maybe 7:35, but we're gonna be here, we're gonna support you, we're gonna answer your questions and we're gonna guide you through this process.

So we try to make it as easy for our volunteers as we possibly can.

- So talk about how we can get behind and help tnAchieves.

- Yeah, we need volunteers, we need mentors.

In Shelby County alone, we need more than 700 people by far our largest county.

We get almost 9,000 applicants to use Tennessee Promise every single year out of Shelby County.

It's almost double what we get outta Nashville, which is our second largest.

So if you are watching this and you've got one hour a month and you feel like you'd like to invest it in local students, you can visit www.tnAchieves.org.

There's a really quick application process.

It'll just take a few minutes, you'll hear from us soon with training options and then you'll be ready to go, start working with students here in the new year.

- So where do we go to learn more and get involved with tnAchieves?

You can visit www.tnAchieves.org to find out more information.

You can always contact me at 615-604-1306 or Graham@tnAchieves.org.

- Well, Graham, thank you for all you and your amazing team do to power the good, thank you for coming on the show.

- Absolutely, Jeremy, thank you so much for having me.

[upbeat music] - They're a nonprofit focused on providing mentors and structured programming to support fourth graders in economically disadvantaged schools.

We're here with the executive director of Academy 4, John Shearer, let's start out, give us some background on Academy 4.

- Yeah, so Jeremy, thanks for having me on the show today.

We are in our 14th year of programming.

We started here in Texas, in Fort Worth and it has really grown from there.

You know, about eight years ago, I was our first full-time employee and we had three schools at that time and now we're in 60 and as you said, we focus on mentorship.

We provide a mentor for every fourth grader in low-income schools, but we also have a fifth grade program called Leaders 5, where those fourth graders from the previous year turn around and mentor a first grader, kind of a reading buddies program and really give those first graders a jump on literacy, but also, we have a program for parents called 4Families, where we just get people together in relationship and connect and support one another and have folks from the community come in and encourage and assist as well.

That has led to, you know, other parts of Texas, we're in places like Austin and Wichita Falls and the Dallas side of the Metroplex here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but we're also now in Memphis and so we've been there about four years, we started in a charter school called Leadership Prep, and this year we added our second school there in the Memphis area at Oakshire Elementary, which is a Memphis Shelby County School.

So anyway, we're really excited about being able to grow in Memphis and really see that just increase over time.

- Talk about the importance of focusing on fourth graders and obviously fifth graders too, but fourth graders.

- Yeah, those fourth graders, there's just this really big window that opens up that you can make a big difference in their lives and it's simple things that are going on with them developmentally, but are really profound, like they're just able to now understand a 4th grade 9, turning 10, not only concrete concepts of course, but they can think in the abstract and so we talk to 'em about leadership and it's really the first time they can connect with that, but also the importance about intentionally building a relationship with an adult, which is an incredibly important skill to have, but also it is something that our fourth graders are benefiting from in real time, that connection with that person who's just there to listen to them, but, you know, with that, kids are also becoming individualistic.

So they're not just adopting behavioral norms from parents and teachers anymore, they're figuring out who they are and so their values, their morals, their ethics, all those things start to form in fourth grade and so we've just found this really pragmatic window where people can show up and make a really big difference in the life of kids because they're eager to connect with us and eager to learn and eager to really grow.

- Well, you make it easy for adults, you make it easy for the mentors, so talk about how the program works.

- Yeah, so the great thing for the adults is, like you said, we put a lot of effort into making it easy for them.

It's a 90-minute commitment.

It's only once a month so that anybody can do it really.

It's on a Friday afternoon and so we give people a great thing that they can go do once a month and make a big difference in the life of kids and, you know, part of that for us is just making sure that you don't have to study up, you don't have to prepare to come and do this.

We spend your first 10 to 15 minutes just telling you what's important about today, what are we gonna focus on.

How can you really encourage that student?

And then always reminding people about how we're gonna keep kids safe and the fundamentals of child safety.

But what is really unique about Academy 4 is that it's not an appointment time where, you know, you show up and you mentor a student when it works for you, I show up at a time that works for me.

No, we all go together at the same time on those Friday afternoons.

So we show up in community and with that, the school really feels that community, 'cause so many of the schools that we're in, these low-income schools, there's just not able to be a lot of parent involvement, it's not that they don't want to, but they don't have the margin of time that a lot of us do and so when we can show up and be an extra layer of community for those kids, it's a difference maker.

Not only in the life of each fourth grader who's experiencing that one-to-one connection, but also just it raises the spirits and the tide, if you will, of the whole school.

- Well, obviously one way we can help is to raise our hand to be a mentor, but how can we get involved?

How can the community help support Academy 4?

- Yeah, so mentoring is huge for us, you know.

I tell people really if you boil it down to the simplest terms, we need a lot of people to do this, you know, 'cause every single student is gonna have that person there, but even people who hear like once a month and it's nine times during the school year, "I don't know if I could commit to that."

Well, you could be a substitute for us and you may only show up a time or two, but to be that person that stands in a gap when somebody's either out sick or has to miss, because they had a previous commitment, that's a big deal and it really keeps that consistency going with that student, but beyond that, you know, of course we're an independent 501[c][3] so, you know, financial support is also a huge deal for us and so for us, we are community funded.

You know, we don't receive federal funding.

We don't take funding from the schools that we're in, because they're all low-income schools and so for us to be able to have people in the community being very generous with our programs, whether it's individuals, businesses, foundations, that's typically how we're funded.

- Well wrap up with where we can learn more and get involved with Academy 4.

- Yeah, so come to academy4.org, whether you wanna support us financially, you'll find links to do that there or whether you wanna volunteer and mentor, we would love to have you, so really easy to do.

All you have to do is take a background check and to volunteer and go through some brief training and we'll get you on the road to success and really able to encourage these fourth graders in our community.

- Absolutely, I love it.

Well, John, thank you for all you and your amazing team do to power the good, thank you for coming on the show.

- Thank you, Jeremy.

We appreciate it.

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

The 2024 Corporate Award for companies with 50 employees or fewer went to Woodyard Realty Corporation.

[bright music] - Woodyard Realty Corporation has been around since 1984.

We specialize in apartment sales, just as any realtor specializes in selling homes.

This year we gave away 2 $5,000 scholarships.

Those are obviously scholarships for college.

We are so excited about the scholarship program.

This has just been, I mean, beyond our wildest dreams that we could do this.

We just saw the need that we had so many talented young adults in the city of Memphis that are just so talented, that are working hard, they're doing all the right things, they're just trying to get out of that chain of not going to college and we came up with that idea that just really, my son and I saw John Carroll with City Leadership, he was talking about investing in Memphis and, you know, we started talking about what could we do?

We talked about a number of things and then we just saw the kids running around the apartment complexes and the young adults living there and how can we help them?

And we wanted to give back to what has given to us so much and that's the rental community, apartment complexes, and give the young adults an opportunity to go, because they've got the drive, they've got the skills, they've got the motivation, they just don't have the money many times and our gift has been able to allow a number of people that would not be able to go to college to actually go and what we're looking to do is to get that one young adult in college so that they grow up and maybe their children go to college and maybe, that just keeps on going and it breaks that cycle of, you know, not having college opportunities.

We get the opportunity to read some of the winner's bios.

It has just been inspiring to read on their part, talking about if I can get this degree, then I can go open up a business, then I can do these things for other people and it is hard not to get emotional just thinking about the things that we have read and the opportunities that they've had.

It also, we saw the need in the apartment industry where you may have a maintenance man that's working on the apartment complex, making a good salary.

However, if he could get a heating, ventilation, air conditioning system certification, his salary suddenly jumps.

He becomes more in demand, more employable.

Same thing with leasing agents.

They've got a number of certifications that they can go through it.

So we just saw that, it was very intentional to have those various levels of opportunities.

It's in the Bible, numerous places, to invest in your city, to grow your city.

It is our goal as a company and I would like to hope it will be a lot more people's goal to just invest in whatever way, same goal.

How do we improve our communities?

How do we make Memphis better?

How can we do this together?

[bright music] - They're a nonprofit with a playbook using targeted literacy, health and wellness programs to prepare youth for success.

We're here with the founder, president and CEO of the Playbook for Success Foundation, Dan Williams.

Dan, you know playbooks very well, playing in the NFL, give us a little bit of your background and what led you to launch the foundation.

- Well, first, most, first, I am a East High graduate, graduated in 2005.

I got a full scholarship to University of Tennessee for football.

Was there, Coach Fulmer was the guy that got me to go to the Rocky Top and then I finished my last year under Coach Kiffin, Lane Kiffin, who's now at Ole Miss.

You know, from there, I got drafted in the first round, the 26th pick, after Tim Tebow in the 2010 draft.

I played professionally for seven years in Arizona and Oakland Raiders.

While my time in Oakland, I started my foundation, it was called Dan Williams Filling the Gap.

One of the reasons why I started was because of my father.

He always told me that, you know, being in the position that I was in, that I needed to give back and then needed to make sure that, you know, I can, you know, make sure the generation behind me has a good foundation and I can, you know, be a part of that, so that's what really got me started.

After I got cut by the Oakland Raiders, I moved, I lived in Arizona for a little bit.

My wife and I moved back to Memphis.

You know, hearing the narratives and the things about, you know, Memphis, you know, being, you know, not living in the city at the time, that really, you know, kind of made me, I don't know, that's not the Memphis I remembered.

So I feel like I wanted to come back, you know, make a change, my wife and I moved here back in 2020, full time, you know, that was during COVID, you know, going through some other things and then eventually my wife told me I was at home too much, that I needed to get out, do something and that's when the Playbook for Success got, you know, got recreated back in 2024 after my son was born.

- And so go ahead and dive into what you do, because it's literacy, it's health, it's wellness.

There's a lot to it, so go ahead and dive in.

- Well, we first started off as a health and wellness through mentorship.

We go over the eight pillars of wellness.

Try to, it is like a holistic approach to the child.

You know, just not tell 'em, "Hey, eat the fruits, eat the vegetables," but this is why, you know, this is why you wanna stay, you know, healthy.

You know, we also talk about mental health, you know, it's things that I've went through as a player myself to where, you know, hey, you know, tell me how did you feel, you know when grandma died?

You know, like when someone passes, you know, a lot of times people don't have a chance to kind of get that off their chest.

I mean, I went through that myself when my dad passed, when I was playing and I was an adult, so I was like, I wonder, you know, how kids go through that when they, you know, are younger and then, you know, there was a dominant figure in their life that is not there anymore.

So we just try to, you know, talk to kids you know about, you know, all the aspects of their life and not just about one specific thing and, you know, and just, you know, just be a listening ear.

You know, sometimes, you know, kids don't want you to just tell 'em everything, but they do just want some time, they want some people to listen.

And as well, we have our reading and literacy program where we partner with Scholastic books where they have a program called Literacy Pro, where is, we're trying to help kids improve their Lexile scores and get on grade reading level.

So, you know, we are right now in Mace Middle School, you know, working with those kids in afterschool program and you know, we're excited, you know, just, you know, get that started and, you know, see where that goes.

- Give us a couple of ways the community can get behind your efforts and support you.

- Well, first they can go to our website, www.theplaybook.org and see, you know, the things that they would like to be a part of.

You know, we're always looking for volunteers for our camps.

We also like, you know, professionals to come speak to our kids, you know, to tell them why reading is important, because, you know, I think a lot of them, you know, they like to either be some type of entertainer, you know, I've heard YouTuber or even a professional athlete and I let them know how important being a, you know, reader and, you know, understanding and comprehending what you read or what you sign, you know, it, you know, correlates with their job choice.

So, but then I also want the kids to know, hey, there's other occupations that they could get into that, you know, there's something might not be right now that they even know of, so, you know, have a banker come by, you know, someone who's a entrepreneur.

I mean, I have HVAC people, you know, it's just, I just want them to be exposed to a lot of different avenues that they could explore once they do get older.

And then another way is, you know, I guess their financial aspect is always needed, you know, but that's on my website as well if you would like to make a donation and, but the first thing I was asked for is people time.

You know, if you can, if you ever would like to, you know, come see what we do, please send, you know, send me an email and, or you, you know, I think my number's even on the website, you know, just, you know, shoot me a text or a call and then we will definitely would love for you to come out to, you know, see the work that we're actually doing.

- So where do we go to learn more and get involved with the Playbook for Success Foundation?

- Well, you can go to www.theplaybook.org, you know, to find the most information.

We have social media, the Playbook For Success, well, it is Playbook For Success Foundation on Instagram.

We also have a Facebook page, the same Playbook For Success Foundation on Facebook and we are now in the process of creating our LinkedIn, it will be The Playbook For Success Foundation as well as I think we even have a TikTok.

It is the Playbook for Success Foundation, so though the TikTok and LinkedIn is not, doesn't have as much information, but you know, if you check out the Instagram and our Facebook page, you know, and of course the website, you know, has all the information.

- Well, Dan, thank you for all you, your family and your team do to power the good.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

[upbeat music] - In every corner of Memphis, potential is waiting to be seen and unlocked.

A fourth grader who just needs an adult to believe in them, a teenager learning that literacy can open doors bigger than they ever imagined.

A first-generation college student who needs a mentor to help navigate campus life and open doors for new career possibilities.

tnAchieves reminds us that when we mentor and invest in our college students to help them succeed, we're unlocking potential to lift our organizations and communities higher.

Academy 4 shows us it only takes an hour and a half a month, one conversation at a time to rewrite a child's story, to tell them they're seen, their capable, their voice matters and they can do great things and through the Playbook for Success Foundation, we see what happens when literacy, health and mentorship come together.

When young people learn not just how to play the game, but how to win in life.

Memphis has always been a city with soul, but the real music of our city isn't found in clubs and concerts, it's the sound of someone being given a chance.

So where can you help power the good and become a spark unlocking potential in others?

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, and we hope you'll continue joining with us to create a spark for the Mid-South.

- From Higginbotham's founding in 1948, our insurance agency 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.

Higginbotham Insurance and Financial Services is honored to be the presenting sponsor of The Spark.

[upbeat music] [acoustic guitar chords]