‘Angel’s Rise’ aims to mentor Chester youth
CHESTER >> About 200 people filled the ballroom at the Willie Mae Leake Center at Seventh and Yarnall streets Thursday night to hear from the newest organization looking to have a positive impact on the city’s youth.
Angel’s Rise, the brainchild of founder Michelle Moore-Santana, D.N.P., welcomed elected officials, judges, educators, high school and college students, and philanthropic leaders to a gala unveiling its new collaborative program.
“What we want to do is collaborate with other organizations in the city, not compete,” she said, hosting the gala to bring representatives from the many organizations operating in the city together and invite them to provide resources for children in the Angel’s Rise program.
“Each child is assessed to see where their life skills are,” Santana told the Times regarding the program, which evaluates children on eight development cycles and matches them with multiple mentors and resources from other organizations based on where their greatest needs lie.
“We need more critical programs to sustain the future of young people and help shape the next generation of community leaders,” said Chester Mayor’s Office Community Liaison Fred Green following Thursday’s gala. “Programs like (Angel’s Rise) this will do exactly that.”
Green was among the public officials in attendance at the gala to hear addresses and musical performances from Chester Upland School District STEM Academy students, the Valiant Voices of Victory Youth Choir from Community Baptist Church, and Washington, D.C.-based author and domestic abuse activist Lakisha Davis-Small.
Ayanna Gregory, daughter of late civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory, closed the program with spoken word and songs. It was a feeling of coming full circle for Gregory, who had been unaware of the city and its history until speaking with her mother after accepting Santana’s invitation.
“She said, ‘You know your dad was there,’” Gregory said following the gala. Speaking with city residents before the event, she realized that a widely circulated photo of her father with Malcolm X was taken in Chester in 1964, when the two were present for efforts to end de facto segregation in city schools.
“(City Director of Community Health Education) Rosetta Carter and (City Councilwoman) Elizabeth Williams said they were teenagers at the time and remembered my father and Malcom (X) and Medgar (Evers) and Martin (Luther King Jr.) being here,” said Gregory. “And I was like – hold up, there’s something about this place. It feels like there’s an opportunity here; it feels like sacred ground in that way.”
“Something’s about to happen here that I think can be a good lesson and example for the whole nation,” said Gregory. Referencing other periods in black American history where “in the darkest circumstances come the most powerful transformation,” she believes the current work in the city and other communities she visits may be the turning point for the negative socio-economic trends in inner-city black communities that followed the successes of the 1960s civil rights movement. “The name ‘Angel’s Rise’ – to me it says the angels are already here and we need them to rise… the intellect and the vision is in Chester.”
Santana, a Registered Nurse and professor, has assembled a board of directors with backgrounds in nursing and behavior health to implement the program based on healthcare and psychological research. “We’re using valid and reliable tools provided by researchers that work with children,” Santana said. “We’re not making it up as we go along – that’s very important for (children and collaborating organizations) to know.”
Along with life skills such as opening a bank account or how to perform on a job interview, according to board member Malekah Clark, R.N., the program will also find partners for children to address the issue of posttraumatic stress disorder.
“That child is under stress and everyone around them is under stress,” Santana said of children who have experienced drive-by shootings or pedestrians being struck by cars. “People are realizing (PTSD) can happen to children, and more programs are developing to give assistance.”
Santana compared the work of the organization to the idiom that “it takes a village to raise a child,”
“We need more critical programs to sustain the future of young people and help shape the next generation of community leaders. Programs like (Angel’s Rise) this will do exactly that.”
— Chester Mayor’s Office Community Liaison Fred Green
recalling her upbringing in former Lamokin Village in the city. She described learning civic responsibility by watching neighborhoods take their trash to a central pit for city workers to collect.
“That’s what we did in the projects – (parents and neighbors) raised us to be upstanding citizens,” she said. “If we can take the trash out together… why can’t we work together for the children?”