CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - Vondale Singleton puts it bluntly when discussing his father.
“I don’t my father,” Singleton says. “My father’s locked up or dead.”
He tells WBBM that when he was the assistant principal at Gary Comer College Prep on the South Side of Chicago about 10 years ago about 90 percent of the kids getting into trouble shared the experience of having a father that was missing from their life.
This inspired him to start the CHAMPS (Culturally Helping and Making Positive Success) male mentoring program.
“When we started, it was eight boys inside of the school who had what we call ‘discipline problems,’ and they would come into my office and get kicked off the class,” Singleton recalls.
CHAMPS Mentoring has now mentored more than 8,000.
“As an assistant principal and administrator in a school, I had to resign from that position to do what I do full-time just because we had over 1,000 people going to our website and getting on the waitlist…It was so overwhelming that I was almost like shocked to realize the high need and concentration for a niche and really mentoring boys and young men of color throughout Chicago,” Singleton says.
Young men with CHAMPS, many for the first time, get the opportunity to travel outside of the city, state, even the country.
“We surround them with a network of all types of individuals, corporations, business leaders, schools, and we take them from Chicago and around the world, literally,” Singleton says.
The CHAMPS Mentoring Program is community and school based, working with schools on the West and South Sides, the suburbs and has additional chapters in other cities and states.
This week’s Difference Maker, through “education, empowerment and exposure” is CHAMPS Mentoring.
“Essentially, we want to take young men, even though they may be in environments they may suggest otherwise that they have to be gang affiliated, related or a part of a sect or faction, we believe that you can actually become and dream and be whoever you want to be,” Singleton says.
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