Couple mentoring at-risk youth take more than 40 kids on East Coast field trip
SPEEDWAY, Ind. (WISH)– Chrystal Hines has served as a mentor more than 18 years, but even before that she saw the impact her mentorship could make.
“I am the product of teenage parents and they really relied on a village to help raise me,” said Hines.
That’s Hines said she felt she had a calling to become a mentor herself. She started by doing it in her spare time with young ladies at a church. Eventually her mission to mentor others transformed into Inner Beauty Mentoring Program.
Meanwhile, at age 11, the man that would become her future husband was also seeing the impact of having a mentor as a kid from Harlem, New York.
“Even though I had a dad in my life, my dad allowed another male mentor to come into my life,” Kareem Hines said.
He said they established a bond so close that when his mentor moved to Indianapolis he followed. That got him thinking.
“If I can have a relationship with a man, who’s not my biological father, and he have that much of an influence on me where I would move from Harlem to Indianapolis, I want to have that same impact on another young man,” he said.
That was a vision that sparked what is now New Breed of Youth (New B.O.Y.)
When Kareem and Chrystal got married they also joined forces to help reach young men and women who have faced or put themselves in tough situations. Along with their team of mentors, they’ve handled anything from teens who’ve entered the juvenile justice system to kids who’ve been put in positions to be witnesses or victims of domestic violence.
“We really focus on what we call a connection before the correction,” Kareem said. “If we can make a connection through programming, then we can make the correction to help them change their life.”
In order to get their message across, sometimes they’ll go outside the box, like when they took a group of more than 40 kids on a field trip to Philadelphia and New York; a trip made possible because of a collaboration with the Indy Mentor Network.
“To get there and go on college tours, go to historical landmarks that they’ve only ever seen on TV, eat food that they didn’t even know existed,” Chrystal remembered.
They’re on a similar mission for their mentees on an every day basis. In their building, they have several rooms and inside each one is something positive for the kids to explore.
Most recently, the couple started a Young Entrepreneurs program. They say it’s a chance to teach their kids the details of business from plans to marketing, branding and creating relationships.
Ultimately they believe the goal is to make sure everyone that comes into their doors will have a chance to find their inner greatness. Kareem drew inspiration from a message one of his mentees put on a t-shirt as a part of one of their first entrepreneurship projects.
“Living through God’s Purpose, over living by the day.”
It’s a message they hope to spread to the youth all over central Indiana and the country.
Learn more about Inner Beauty and New B.O.Y. here.