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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.