Honorable Young Men Club seeks to expand reach with new initiative

Local youth mentorship program the Honorable Young Men Club is looking to take its initiative to another level.

The organization was founded in 2016 by four former Southeast Missouri State University football players — Kweku Arkorful, Wyky Jean, Cantrell Andrews and Aaron Adeoye — and they’ve just established HYMC Empowerment Inc., a new foundation created to help the program grow into its next chapter.

HYMC Empowerment will continue to service HYMC members, but will now include their families, as well. As they’ve spent time during the coronavirus pandemic reflecting on how to better serve the community and the kids in the community, the founders say they are refocusing.

“Our main goal is to figure out how we can solve the deeper needs that we identified the last few years, and really provide opportunity, provide partnerships, so these kids can really start to sense a generational change,” Jean said.

“We want to make sure the kids are well-equipped,” he said. “The HYMC is dedicated to create a community where we empower young men in effort to shape the direction of their lives.”

The club started at Cape Girardeau Central Middle School in fall 2016, but the founders said they feel the group has outgrown those walls.

Having mentored more than 200 young men, HYMC also followed and continues to maintain relationships with their first group of children, and recognize that they are now young adults, going into adulthood. That’s when they decided to expand outside the walls of the school and into the community.

However, “we want to keep the school initiative going. We know that’s imperative. We know that that’s where the kids are every single day,” Arkorful said.

Although the HYMC founders are no longer in the schools as employees, they are exploring ideas to work with the district as contract executives, and would like to have more mentors such as community members to train, “so it doesn’t just live and die with us,” Arkorful said.

HYMC will go from being a school-based program to a community-based initiative. HYMC has a partnership with House of Hope, 1000 Ranney Ave., offering after-school activities, mentoring sessions, events, classes, camps and workshops. They will be focusing on trade careers, job training, workplace skills, entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

“There’s not a one size fits all — we understand that and we’re really going to be innovative,” Jean said.

HYMC Empowerment hosted its first fundraising mixer Thursday night at Codefi in downtown Cape Girardeau and plan to continue to raise money to support the initiative. HYMC needs around $500,000 to keep going for about a year. But in three years, their plan is to be self-sustainable with other resources, such as state grants, contracts, etc.

One of the new focuses of the organization will be financial literacy, reaching out to students they’ve mentored, and their parents.

“We’re doing amazing things and we just felt like parents are getting kind of left out,” Arkorful said. “Their child is learning all these amazing things, but, how can they contribute, too? So, when your son is coming home, now they can have those conversations and it’s more powerful. Mother and son or father and son conversations. We’ve just seen how a kid can be transformed. We want to start with this foundation first — financial literacy — because we see the gap in poverty and we can talk about it and where to start changing that.”

The other major focus will be creating more mentors. HYMC will be starting a mentoring training plan to identify candidates that would be effective and passionate mentors, to grow the team and expand the organization and mission.

“The cool part is, it’s not going to be just three to four guys anymore. It could be seven. It could be 15. Depends on, obviously, how much funds we can raise,” Jean said.

The men try to become immersed in the lives of the students they mentor, going into the neighborhoods, playing ball with them.

“The kids have our phone numbers, they come to the house, they walk my dog.” Jean said. “The relationships are ... they’re strong. We’ve established a family. We’ve established a community — a brotherhood, if you will. And it’s pretty, pretty awesome.”

For more information about HYMC Empowerment or to learn how to contribute, visit www.hymclub.org.