Austin native who’s changing lives halfway around the world now doing the same here
Born and raised by a single mom in West Side Austin, Terrance Wallace was labeled learning disabled at his Chicago Public Schools elementary school, daily traversing the gangs and drugs and violence that gripped his community in his formative years.
In eighth grade, his mother decided to send him to a high school outside of his community, Taft High on the Northwest Side, for a better education, and that has made all the difference, says Wallace, founder of the internationally lauded InZone Project that’s been educating impoverished, indigenous students in New Zealand for 10 years.
The 43-year-old pastor is now replicating the program in Chicago, his life story the subject of a new film, “In the Zone,” that premiered in Chicago on Thursday night, its U.S. launch after showing in New Zealand in 2018. Churches, community organizations and civic venues will host screenings of the documentary.
“So when you talk about the violence in the city of Chicago, I lived through it,” Wallace said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday night, after flying in from New Zealand.
By his sophomore year, one of his cousins, addicted to drugs, was found strangled. Another was shot and killed in his car. A third, whom he was closest to, committed suicide.
“My grandfather was the male role model in my life, because we lived in the same house. And his guidance, combined with my mom’s decision to move me from the neighborhood school, then planting me in the church, were the three components that kept me from succumbing to peer pressure,” Wallace said.
“Those hits — what happened to my cousins — if it wasn’t for my mom allowing me to have a spiritual development of my own, I don’t think I would have survived,” he said. “Not to mention after some other devastating things that happened to me before even that point.”
That devastating thing was being molested by a youth ministry pastor in 1993. The case made headlines years later, in 1998, when the Rev. Michael M. Taylor was charged with sexual abuse of another 17-year-old. Taylor eventually pleaded guilty, serving jail time. And Wallace filed a civil suit in 2003 and was awarded a financial settlement by his former church.
He went on to college, worked as a bookkeeping manager at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park for several years, then felt called to work with youth in his old neighborhood.
That would lead to several years of youth ministry at the Westside Health Authority before he and three others, including current pastor John F. Hannah, co-founded Grand Crossing’s New Life Covenant Church in 2003. But that was the same year tragedy would strike.
Wallace was carjacked at a gas station at 55th and the Dan Ryan, kidnapped by three men, driven to an alley, beaten, left for dead.
His revisiting the scene of that crime some 15 years later is one of the more poignant moments of director Robyn Paterson’s film for Vendetta Films.
“They drove me to an alley in the back of an abandoned building, made me get on my knees, put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger. But nothing happened,” he recounted.
“I just began to continually confess Isaiah 54:17, ‘No weapon formed against me shall prosper.’ They took the first gun out, another guy put a second gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger. Again, nothing happened. So they just started beating me with the guns and left me there bleeding.”
Wallace dragged himself out onto a residential block and begged for help from strangers. He was hospitalized for months. Later, he would go on to work for New Life for several years, then for another organization, Changing Patterns, serving families in Altgeld Gardens until 2009.
That’s when he felt again called. “I was praying, and suddenly I hear, ‘New Zealand.’ I went to the globe to see where this place was that God was sending me,” Wallace recounts. “My first thought when I saw it was an island: ‘I can’t swim.’ My next thought: ‘Are there even any black people there?’ ”
But he followed that calling. Moving to New Zealand, he discovered the segregation and poverty afflicting its indigenous populations. Wallace decided to establish homes for those students within predominantly white, wealthy communities, so they could attend high-quality schools — just as his mother had done for him. He had to battle political forces.
But 10 years later, InZone has been wildly successful at educating impoverished youth, amassing international acclaim. Initial naysayers like New Zealand Prime Minister John Key are now its strongest supporters.
And two years ago, he again felt called — to come home and replicate the program. InZone’s first home opened in Wauconda in 2018. The second will open in Barrington this August.
“I always used to say, ‘God, if you’re real, show yourself to me to give me the strength to endure,’ because I felt no kid should ever have to deal with the things I dealt with.
“But you know, Tyler Perry said it best,” Wallace said. “He said sometimes we look at poor people’s lives, and the bad environments they grow up in, as something really bad. But God can take that situation and make it your master class.
“That’s what happened with me. Every hit that I took prepared me with resilience and the ability to support our current generation in the times that we now live in.”