Every young person is running a quiet calculation. Do I matter here? Will anybody notice if I am gone? Is there a seat at this table with my name on it? They would never say it that way, but the math runs all the time, in classrooms and courtrooms and in kitchens where the chair across the table has been empty for years. The answer a child lands on shapes everything that comes after.

I know this as a founder. I knew it first as a father. Children do not ask the adults in their lives to be perfect. They ask us to be present, and they keep the books on us more honestly than any auditor ever could. Every time we show up, learn a young man's name and his story, and come back again, we make a deposit into an account he will draw on for the rest of his life. Stay long enough and the trust starts to compound. But when nobody invests, that account does not sit at zero. It goes negative. A young person with no reserve of belonging does not stop taking risks. He takes different ones.

Here is what troubles me about how today's society does its accounting.

We have built a whole economy around the second chance. A startup founder can fail three times, and we call the fourth attempt experience. Investors write checks to people whose last two companies collapsed, because in that world failure is tuition. We fund the comeback.

Then a fourteen-year-old acts out. He does exactly what a boy with an empty account and a still-developing brain is likely to do, and nobody calls his failure tuition. They call it a record. There is no comeback fund waiting for him, just a placement and a file. The same behavior we finance in one zip code, we prosecute in another. The founder and the boy are not different kinds of people. They started with different balances. One was born with belonging on deposit. The other was born in overdraft, and we punish him for terms he never wrote.

So how do we make young people feel like they belong? We stop treating belonging like a byproduct and start treating it like infrastructure. Nobody hopes a bridge into existence. You fund it and you maintain it. Belonging gets built the same way, through relationships that hold, adults who return, and rooms where a young man can look up and see himself in somebody who made it through.

Which brings me to the people best positioned to do this work, and what we do to them.

The most credible investors in a young person's belonging are often the men and women who lost their own and fought their way back. A lived experience mentor does not have to imagine the courtroom, the cell, or the long walk home with a record. He has the map because he walked the terrain. And when he sits across from a young man, the calculation changes. Somebody like me made it. Maybe there is a seat for me after all.

Yet the path we make these mentors walk is one of the most restrictive in the helping professions. A felony conviction, sometimes decades old, sometimes earned in the same childhood chaos we now ask them to help other children survive, becomes a barrier at nearly every door. Background checks. Clearances. Licensing rules. Facility restrictions. Most professionals will never comprehend what these men and women navigate just to show up for a child. The experience that qualifies them is the very thing we use to disqualify them.

Sit with what that teaches. We tell a boy his mistake does not have to define him, and then he watches the man mentoring him get turned away at the door for a mistake from twenty years ago. He learns the lesson we actually taught, not the one we meant to.

I am not arguing against safeguards. Children deserve protection, always. I am arguing against a system that preaches redemption and practices exclusion. If we believe in second chances, the proof is not in what we tell young people. It is in who we allow to stand beside them.

At The Delta Project we hold a simple discipline: See the child before the case, the family before the file. The economics of belonging asks one thing more of us. See the deposit before the deficit. Every young person arrives carrying an account, and the balance is not his fault. It is our shared ledger. We can keep paying on the back end, in placements and prosecutions and interrupted lives, or we can invest on the front end, in mentors, in presence, in a seat that stays open at the table.

One of those choices compounds. The other just costs.

I am expecting the young men in my circle to bring up Nolan Wells.

Maybe not by name. It may come as a question about the news. It may come sideways, in a joke that is not really a joke about boat trips and who you go with. But it is coming.

I already hear it among my contemporaries. Grown men turning the story over after meetings, in group texts, in the quiet at the end of phone calls. What the grown men are saying and what the young men are holding are two entirely different conversations, and most of the time they happen in different rooms.

I have spent my life trying to close the distance between those two rooms.

Here is how we break it down, because parents, mentors, coaches, and teachers are facing the same silence at their own kitchen tables.

Mentally, we hold two truths at once. Your fear is not paranoia. It is inheritance. Black families in this country have buried too many sons under circumstances that were explained too quickly. And we do not let our pain write facts that have not been established. We can demand a full and honest investigation, stand with a grieving family, and still refuse to hand our minds over to speculation.

Physically, we let the grief be in the body, because that is where it lives. Shoulders up. Sleep short. Jaw tight in a way he cannot explain. So we move. We get young men in rooms together. We eat together. We name what the body is doing out loud, so a young man learns that shaking hands are information and not weakness.

Narratively, we take the pen back. In marginalized communities, storytelling is not decoration. It is survival. Our people carried freedom in songs and whole family histories in the space between a grandmother’s sentences, because the official record was never written for us or by us.

A young man’s name is being pulled in every direction by strangers with platforms, and his family is trying to grieve inside that noise. Whatever the facts turn out to be, the people closest to him deserve to lead the telling. Every young man watching is learning a lesson about what happens to your story when you are no longer here to tell it.

The Delta Project began with a question a student in detention asked me in 2017: How do I become something I don’t see? Our answer, from the first day, was to put the tools of storytelling into young men’s hands. A young man who can tell his own story, in his own voice, has something no system and no news cycle can take from him.

Grieve him. Say his name with care. Stand with his family’s right to answers. Let your body feel what it feels. And then pick up the pen, the camera, the microphone, whatever is in reach, and keep telling your story.

These conversations do not get easier. They are not supposed to. They are supposed to get truer.

#YouthJustice  #Mentorship  #Storytelling  #CredibleMessengers

The Curriculum in the Chair

There’s a reason a young man will tell his barber what he won’t tell almost anyone else. For thirty or forty-five minutes, he’s sitting still, with someone he trusts, and the guard comes down.

Lansing is leaning into that truth. This June, News 10 reported on Barbershop Talk, a series run by Child and Family Charities, where young people 14 to 21 get a free haircut and an open conversation — led by trusted adults — about gun violence, suicide, and fatherhood. As one barber described it, the trust deepens with every visit, and so does the willingness to talk.

What the reporting captured was the room. What it didn’t name was the framework guiding those conversations: Son to a Father, the curriculum written by Cole Williams for The Delta Project. Built around the questions young men rarely get to ask out loud about masculinity, fatherhood, mental health, and becoming something you’ve never seen modeled. It’s designed to travel into the rooms where young men already are. In Lansing, it’s doing exactly that.

None of this is a hunch. A landmark Cedars-Sinai study in the New England Journal of Medicine proved that Black men reached in the barber’s chair got results the clinic couldn’t touch. And the research now points to the next frontier: mental health, young men, delivered by the people they already trust. That’s exactly the gap Son to a Father steps into.

That’s what The Delta Project has staked its work on: belonging is the intervention. Put a curriculum like Son to a Father in a trusted messenger’s hands, and the chair stops being just a chair. It becomes one of the few places a young man is met with substance,

experience, compassion, and support all at once.

The reporting told the story of the chair. This is the story of what’s being said in it.

The Best Kind of Summer Day

Grand Rapids opened the summer with a heat wave, and The Delta Project met it head-on.

Day one of Summer Experience Week took the Healthy Connections crew to Craig’s Cruisers for go-karts, bumper cars, laser tag, trampolines, slides, the buffet — and a few rounds of ice cream. It was, in Program Director Shanda Vaughn’s words, “loud, chaotic, sweaty, and so much fun. The best kind of summer day.”

Day two, the heat came back harder, so Shanda let the girls decide. They voted for a movie:

Toy Story 5, popcorn, cold drinks. What looked like a rest day turned into something more.

The film opened a real conversation about technology, friendship, and being present with

the people in front of you — and the young women had a lot to say:

“Starting a friendship over a device is not always good.” — Diamond 

“It’s okay to get off your phone once in a while.” — LaMiya

The conversation kept going over wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, where the girls turned their

own reflections into a plan: a no-phones challenge for Thursday’s camp day, on terms they set themselves.

That’s the quiet genius of Shanda’s leadership. She doesn’t lecture a room about presence, instead she builds the space where young people arrive at the lesson on their own. 

Two days in, that’s exactly what The Delta Project’s mission looks like in action.

Thank you, Shanda. Summer’s just getting started.

The Warmest Thing in the Room

On Father’s Day weekend, during Juneteenth, Cole Williams carried The Fatherhood Project to New York City. In a darkened room, two fathers featured in the documentary watched their lives reflected on the screen and received by an audience.

It was more than a screening. It was an argument against the harmful stories America continues to tell about Black fathers.

The film offered something different: fathers holding their children’s hands, showing tenderness, remaining present, and doing the difficult work of raising families in systems that have too often worked to separate them. For the men in the room, it was a public reminder that their stories mattered and that they deserved to be seen fully.

The Delta Project was invited to New York by Avenues for Justice, an organization that supports young people impacted by the justice system. The weekend also created space to connect with Real Dads Network, which helps fathers heal, grow, and strengthen their relationships with their families.

Though the organizations work in different cities, the heart of their work felt familiar: a shared belief that people deserve support before judgment, that a young person is more than the worst moment of his life, and that healing and accountability must exist together.

A weekend in New York cannot undo the systems that continue to separate fathers from their children or reduce young people to case numbers. A documentary cannot change a sentence or repair every broken relationship.

But something meaningful traveled home with The Delta Project: proof that this work is not happening in isolation. Across cities, people are choosing care, consistency, accountability, and love.

The Delta Project is a Grand Rapids nonprofit working to break cycles of incarceration by reconnecting youth of color and their families to community through mentorship, coaching, and storytelling.

The work continues.

The Delta Project, Michigan Center for Youth Justice, and Wayne State University Center for Behavioral Health and Justice have been selected as co-lead recipients of the IGNITING FUTURES: A Youth Justice Grant from Public Welfare Foundation. The Michigan coalition was awarded $1,000,000 and is one of only two coalitions selected nationwide.

This investment will support a new statewide coalition focused on reshaping Michigan’s youth justice system through community-rooted programming, research, policy advocacy, and systems-level change. Each partner brings a distinct strength to the work. The Delta Project brings deep community trust and direct service experience with young people and families impacted by the juvenile justice system. Wayne State University contributes research, evaluation, and evidence-based practice expertise. Michigan Center for Youth Justice brings statewide policy and advocacy capacity.

Together, the coalition will focus on three key priorities: better leveraging Michigan’s Child Care Fund so resources reach young people, families, and community organizations more effectively; expanding youth diversion options to reduce deeper system involvement; and bridging critical service gaps for families navigating the juvenile justice system.

For The Delta Project, this grant represents both an expansion of the work and a continuation of its mission. Programs like Boys to Men-tors, the Young Fathers Initiative, Healthy Connections, and the What I Know Now podcast will continue to grow alongside the coalition’s broader systems-change efforts.

“This grant is not a destination. It is the foundation,” said Cole Williams, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Delta Project. “The Delta Project, Michigan Center for Youth Justice, and Wayne State University have come together to build something Michigan’s young people have needed for a long time — a coalition with the community trust, research infrastructure, and policy reach to produce real, statewide change.”

Through this coalition, The Delta Project will help advance a more just, humane, and effective youth justice system across Michigan.

In this compelling article, Bryson Adkins explores the adultification of Black boys through the lens of a powerful presentation by Cole Williams and Bilal Al-Raed at the GVSU Black Boys & Men National Symposium. The discussion sheds light on harmful stereotypes and systemic issues, emphasizing the need for community support, emotional intelligence, and spaces for Black boys and men to express their feelings. Discover how these initiatives aim to create meaningful change in the lives of Black youth.

We're excited to share that The Delta Project has been featured in a wonderful article on WZZM13, highlighting our impactful work in Grand Rapids. This media spotlight celebrates our team's dedication and the transformative journeys of the youth we support. Read the full story on WZZM13 to see how we're making a difference and join us in our mission!

Cole and Joel are joined by two incredible guests, Iyanna and Bilal, to delve deep into the realities of the juvenile justice system and the poignant lessons that emerge from their personal journeys.

Cole and Joel sit down with Judge Kellen Dotson to dive deep into the intricacies of the criminal justice system and explore the transformative power of love, patience, and education within it.

Cole and Joel as they sit down with Bilal, a former student, now an artist and poet who pivoted his life from the brink of juvenile life sentencing to the boundless realms of college and creativity.

Cole and Joel dive deep into a passionate discussion about foster parenting, juvenile justice system, and the marginalization of people of color in parent-child dialogues.

Cole and Joel dive into the challenges faced by young fathers and how they are supported.

Learn more about the work that Cole is doing with Jason Smith and the Juvenile Justice Task Force.

Joel sits down on the Chezubatalks podcast.

Joel sits down to talk all things Delta Project with the Mitten Foundation.

Joel Van Kuiken writes about the power of vertical thinking

Renée Cummings returns to Grand Rapids to re-engage with the community and begin mentoring students from NexTech HS

Co-founder Cole Williams is quoted in Pro Publica article that touts recommendations by the Governor’s Juvenile Justice Reform Task Force.