Ex-criminals to help gang members change lives
FORMER gang members are being helped to turn their lives around with a new scheme being run in the West Midlands.
They are being paired up with business people who will mentor them and offer them advice on following a new path and leaving a life of crime behind.
REAL Leaders, based in Birmingham, in partnership with Leaders in Business, is running the scheme, called The Blue Project. It is looking for new mentors to sign up and learn leadership skills.
Richard Egan, founder of REAL Leaders, said: “Many of our young people are not bad people, yet when you grow up in a deprived area, you don’t meet career professionals, let alone have a chance to be mentored by one.”
Mr Egan has 12 mentors signed up to the scheme, which runs for 18 months, and is looking for more.
Former drug baron John Burton, who has now turned his life around, is among those professionals supporting the project.
He started his criminal career as a teenager and served long stretches in prison for money laundering and cigarette smuggling as well as drugs offences.
When he left prison in 2017, he launched Inside Connections, a company dedicated to helping young people leaving custody, care or the armed forces find the right path intro training and employment.
He said: “I have been involved in criminality for a long time; I was involved in drugs internationally; I was involved in cigarettes internationally; I was involved in laundering large amounts of money. But for all that money, if I could change the 16 years that I had in prison sentences, I would change it tomorrow.
“If I was offered the opportunity to sit with a mentor who had done well for themselves in business and I knew they had made a lot of money and done it right I would have changed my life a long time ago. Unfortunately for me when I was a child and when I was growing up there was none of that around.”
He added: “The Blue Project is a fantastic opportunity to help 18 to 24 year olds. Just imagine, if we change one life then we’ve got something to be proud of, but I believe we can change a lot more lives.”