The Greenwood Mentoring Group’s 12th annual Community Prayer Breakfast, coming up on Saturday, is the organization’s biggest fundraiser of the year.
“We really want you to come and see we’re an organization that does what it says it’s going to do,” said Bill Clay, founder and director of the mentoring program for children that runs an after-school program during school months and offers many other enrichment activities throughout the year.
“We educate the whole child,” Clay said. “We educate them in the neighborhood and outside the neighborhood. We’re developing future leaders.”
Saturday’s breakfast at the Leflore County Civic Center will be a strictly two-hour gathering with eggs, bacon, coffee, speakers and a mission to collect crucial donations to run the program for another year.
Clay said he hopes people who haven’t attended before will come just to hear what the group is up to — but if they can’t, he hopes they will donate anyway. Individual tickets are $20, and donations of any amount are welcome.
“Everything we do here is free, at no charge to the kids.”
Clay sweeps his large hands in the air when he speaks, unable to contain his enthusiasm about the work that goes on in the Greenwood Mentoring Group’s small house on Avenue G in south Greenwood.
“The growth this year of children and activities is a godsend,” he said.
From August 2017 to this month, the center has seen 2,147 encounters with children who have come through its doors. That compares with 1,567 the year before.
Currently, 38 neighborhood kids are enrolled in the after-school program, and 24 of them are new.
“When they walk in the door in the afternoon, the first question we ask is about their homework,” Clay said. “But we do much more than just homework here.”
Utilizing volunteers and a peer-to-peer system that encourages kids to help kids, the program is set up to encourage critical thinking and problem solving.
“We ask them to tell us their thinking about a particular problem; then if they get stuck, we can assist.”
That way, Clay said, students learn their own thought processes and are able to go to school and tell a teacher how they came to certain conclusions. “They might not always be right, but they are learning critical thinking.”
The center encourages community involvement as well. Since it has been at its current location, improvements to the immediate neighborhood are tangible.
“Before we moved in here, you could have filled a truck with the trash laying around,” Clay said. “We made this a Trash Free Zone. Now, people don’t drop their stuff here — and if they do, we’re out there picking it up.”
Educating the whole child sometimes involves getting kids out of their familiar environment and taking them to places they might not otherwise see.
This year, the program made field trips to Montgomery and Selma in Alabama, to visit such key civil rights sites as the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Rosa Parks Museum. Beyond the educational value and exposure, these trips inspire other learning opportunities — such as getting up really early to do something special.
“The kids were supposed to be here at 4 a.m. to leave for the trip,” Clay said. “Linda (Whittington, a volunteer in the program) and I were here at 2:30 making breakfast, and we heard the first knocks on the door at 3:15. They were ready to go.”
The group saw the Greenwood Little Theatre production of “Dreamgirls” and visited the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum this year as well.
Clay and the group are planning a trip to the Stennis Space Center and then to Biloxi later this year.
“These kids have never seen the beach,” he said.
Two of the speakers at Saturday’s breakfast are the kind of mentors Clay likes to expose his kids to — Dr. John Fair Lucas III, a Greenwood surgeon who has made a computer lab a reality at the Greenwood Mentoring Center, and Larry Griggs, executive vice president of Greenwood Utilities.
“It’s important for our kids to have exposure to people who have experienced success in their lives, who they might run into at Walmart or at church. People from right here,” he said.
It’s important for them to do well in school, to see the bigger world, and sometimes it’s the smaller things that make a difference, according to Clay, like learning to shake hands properly.
Most importantly, he said, the work is constant and hands-on. Children know they can count on it.
“Don’t complain about the direction kids are going in and not give them direction, the GPS points to get where they need to be,” he said.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
What: The Greenwood Mentoring Group’s 12th annual Community Prayer Breakfast
When: Saturday, 8 to 10 a.m.
Where: Leflore County Civic Center
Other: $20 per individual ticket includes breakfast and the program. All donations are welcome. Those who can’t attend the breakfast but want to donate can do so at the Greenwood Mentoring Group’s Facebook page by PayPal or call 455-1195.
