City man hoping to revive outreach program
Wallace Simmons, the brains behind the oncethriving Colors United, driven to bring it back
W allace Simmons was a military policeman during the Vietnam War, but after he was discharged the city native occasionally found himself on the wrong side of the law and paid for it with his freedom.
By 1992, Simmons had cleaned up his act and was thinking about ways to make at-risk young people less prone to the temptations of drugs and the ethnically-driven violence in the city’s melting pot of African-Americans, Southeast Asians, Latinos and whites.
And so he launched an organization called Colors United. The nonprofit identified itself as “a grassroots initiative to promote outreach, educational referrals, informational and racially inclusive recreational programs aimed at reducing school dropout, teenage pregnancy, juvenile criminal involvement and substance abuse for youths from the ages of 7 to 21
“I have a calling for this. I’m at the very, very beginning of this. But with a little publicity, I think it will fly.” —Wallace Simmons, on trying to resurrect Colors United
years old in Northern Rhode Island.” Operating from a Main Street storefront in what is now a church, the organization thrived with support from the city, United Way, the Rhode Island Foundation and others.
Less than three years after its founding, however, Colors United folded – the result, Simmons says, of the loss of a grant writer who had been working as an unpaid volunteer, someone he knew from his connections at the Veterans Administration.
Simmons is 63 years old now and suffers from a variety of ailments, including COPD and a painful bone neuropathy known as Charcot foot which has put him at risk of amputation. But the resident of Hanora Lippitt Manor says that despite the passage of time and his struggle to regain his health, some things have not changed, including a continuing need to provide young people with outlets that prepare them for success.
That’s why he wants to bring back Colors United.
“There’s a lot of kids, white, black, who have been in trouble,” says Simmons. “They don’t necessarily want to join the YMCA. They don’t want to join the Boys & Girls Club.”
The former executive director of Colors United says he has “a calling” to resurrect the organization and wouldn’t have any trouble putting together a board of directors. He says he has begun putting out some preliminary feelers to local social service organizations like NeighborWorks and Community Care Alliance to get a bead on whether they’d be interested in formalizing a relationship with a reconstituted Colors United.
When the organization was formed, Simmons says, he was motivated, in part, by racially driven tensions between young ethnic minorities in the city. There is still gang-related activity in the city, says Simmons, but at the time the rivalries were drawn according to uniquely ethnic lines.
Colors United bridged the divide by sponsoring basketball games, dances and other social opportunities for young people of all ethnic backgrounds. In cooperation with other nonprofits, the organization also coordinated afterschool enrichment programs and boxing lessons in its 6,000-square-foot downtown facility.
“It was definitely a good idea,” says Devyne Andrews.
Now in his 30s, Andrews is a paving contractor today and got involved in Colors United at the urging of his uncle – Simmons. Sometimes, he says members would just jog around the city or practice boxing at the Main Street facility.
But Andrews says he remembers the racially charged atmosphere in the city in those days and how mingling at social events organized by Colors United helped ease the tensions.
“That’s how we all got to know each other,” says Andrews. “When we went to Colors United that’s how were able to get it to rest. It was all positive when we got together.”
Indeed, says Simmons, launching Colors United was largely about steering youths away from crime and drugs. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered so much to him if he didn’t know from experience how important a goal it was.
“I’m an ex-con,” Simmons says – his first answer when asked why he founded Colors United.
Simmons says he first tried heroin in Vietnam but didn’t get addicted until he returned to the city in the ’70s. Heroin was easy to get, but now the risks are even higher, he says, with the introduction of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic that’s increasingly linked to an epidemic of overdose fatalities. The director of the state Division of Behavioral Health, Rehabilitation and Hospitals recently testified before Congress that Woonsocket had the secondhighest rate of opioid-related overdose fatalities in the state in 2016.
Simmons, who’s been clean for many years, says he did time for peddling counterfeit money and assault with a dangerous weapon – a Cadillac that struck a police cruiser. He still thinks it was a set-up because he was dating a white girl at the time – the daughter of a policeman. But the latter offense cost him two years in prison, says Simmons, and that was only part of the freight.
Simmons had been discharged from Vietnam on a 100 percent disability pension. Doctors had said he was suffering from schizophrenia because he was having hallucinatory flashbacks. But that was the only label they had for his symptoms in an era that predated the identification of another condition associated with the psychic trauma of combat – Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Because he was convicted of the ADW, the government suspended his disability pension. He says he’s been appealing the decision for years in attempts to have it reinstated.
During an interview in his compact apartment on the fourth floor of Hanora Lippitt Manor, Simmons speaks in a raspy baritone as he acknowledges the many hurdles he’d face in rekindling the oncethriving organization. He’d need technical and grant-writing support to refresh the legal standing of Colors United as a nonprofit organization and apply for financial help from various sources. He’d also need access to some sort of facility to serve as administrative and event space.
But he says he’s determined to give it his best shot.
“I have a calling for this,” he says. “I’m at the very, very beginning of this. But with a little publicity, I think it will fly.”