A legacy of local outreach carries on
We Care 2.0 reinvents Larry Griffin’s mission to serve community
Kwame “Chubbz” Gray was just chilling, “standing on the corner,” when a masked older man approached him with an offer: Leave the “dope corner” and learn a building trade.
“First, he started by offering me turkey soup,” said Gray, 25, a resident of Clay Street in Annapolis. “He said, ‘Let’s go get some turkey soup.’ And I was open to it. I was like, soup? Yeah.”
That masked man was Christopher “Supreme” Towns, 56, who, over the summer, stepped into the very big shoes of Annapolis legend, Larry Griffin, as the new director of community outreach for We Care and Friends.
Griffin, once a drummer with the band Mama Jama is still very much alive and keeping the beat here in Annapolis, part of what makes it so hard to write about the musician-turned-activist in the past-tense.
A master of reinvention, Griffin, 70, was a one-time drug-addict who started the non-profit We Care and Friends in 1992 to help people struggling with substance abuse find and pay for rehabilitation. Back in the late 1990s, he was felled by a near-fatal battle with mantle-cell lymphoma, only to come back to We Care, stronger than ever, expanding its outreach beyond drug rehabilitation and into summer programs for children in areas with high drug abuse patterns.
But for the past few years, as Griffin’s health has been deteriorating because of dementia, the organization he and his wife, Rachel Griffin, ran on a shoestring budget and an unlimited supply of charisma, floundered. Their board of directors disbanded. Donations plummeted.
Rachel Griffin had her hands full working a full-time job and helping her husband navigate his days. We Care was left with one part-time administrator, Sue Farrell, who was struggling to maintain it.
“The spirit of it was the only part of the old organization that stayed alive,” Farrell said. “That, and the screaming needs of the community.”
Griffin’s gift for reinvention has not been lost. On a week when the eyes of the world are watching with horror the way America deals with street crime, We Care’s new executive team set up tents at People’s Park
with tables with bagged lunches, packs of Narcan and supplies of hygiene products and introduced themselves to anyone in the downtown Annapolis community that didn’t already know that We Care 2.0 was open for business.
What might not be clear, with all the talk of soup and entrepreneurship, is that their organization is built on listening to the community and interrupting the potential for violence.
“We want to take the platform Larry built and move it,” said Shelton Willett, Rachel Griffin’s son, who she asked to be the new CEO of We Care.
He could see his mom struggling to keep the organization alive, and so he stepped up last fall and launched with a new board of directors. They will continue to help drug abusers but the new focus is on convincing the generation that grew up in the shadow of the war on drugs that they can make a decent living off the street.
Willett, in turn, called upon Towns, his uncle, to step into the position of “director of community outreach,” because he thought he was “the closest thing to Larry” he knew. Watching Towns pop up to greet visitors to the We Care tent, you can see he’s a people-magnet like Larry Griffin has always been.
Like Griffin, Towns had first-hand experience in the drug trade. He spent 2006 to 2012 in federal prison on drug charges. He said the “trade” taught him about aspects of entrepreneurship, but nothing about investment or savings. So all the money he made, he spent. Now, he’s helping show others how to turn their business smarts into long-term careers.
“I’ve been part of the problem,” he said. “Now, I want to be part of the solution.”
For months, Willett and Towns have been spending time standing on “dope spots” in town, meeting the young people where they congregate on corners, building trust and encouraging them to leave their criminal work and take advantage of the Annapolis Police Department’s newly funded Positive Impact job-training program, helping them with everything from filling out forms to providing transportation.
“These are people with influence in their neighborhoods,” Towns said. “They’re leaders.”
Their message hit home with Gray, whose father and uncle have both built careers in the HVAC business, but whose own path has been derailed, first by time in jail and then by the $20,000 cost of certification.
After having turkey soup with Towns, the two sat down and talked about their similar pasts and about opportunities for a future that Gray had not been able see before. It filled Gray with hope and has inspired him to work with Towns bringing more young people into the program.
“We clicked,” said Gray, who had filled out lots of job applications in the past, including some at “Second Chances” events designed specifically for returning citizens. But he never heard back from any employers. “It brought a tear of joy to my eye to be thinking of owning my own business. I was just sitting there thinking about naming it after my kids.”
It’s a future that many standing on the corners won’t get to see.
After he signed himself up for classes, Gray convinced several of his closest friends, including a 21-year old Obery Court neighbor named Jaylin King to also sign up. Tuesday, King caught a ride with Towns and Gray to the Annapolis police department’s job-training offices.
He signed up to do the May HVAC training with Gray and the two left, looking forward to making a new start, together. Two days later, King was found dead in a parking lot in Glen Burnie, the second victim of apparent gun violence from Gray’s neighborhood in the past six months.
“He was my protégé. He was my brother,” said Gray, choking back emotion.
In the hard first hours after he learned of his friend’s murder, he was feeling like his whole future plan was a wash. He couldn’t think of who to talk to. Who would understand what he had lost? Without missing a beat, he reached out to Towns, who took the time to walk him through his grief.
It’s the kind of connection that Larry Griffin nurtured for decades, making his rounds on the same city blocks. He knew that the best intervention started with a conversation; a bite to eat and an invitation into a community that welcomes without hesitation.