Marcus Stone's Graduation Speech

Marcus Stone wrote down his thoughts to share at his Jobs for Life graduation last Friday. Above, he's pictured at left being congratulated by his classmates after giving a moving account of his experiences at Advance.

Marcus agreed to let us share his speech here.

"I would like to thank the Lord first for guiding me to Advance Memphis because I think this was a great experience for me. This really helped me make a change because it put me around positive people and helped me mentally. It helped keep me on the right track spiritually. I learned that the decision I make now will affect my future, either positively or negatively. I want to make good decisions now so that I can have a good future for myself and especially for my daughter, Mariyah.

I do understand that I am on the right track now, and that it would be easy to veer off at any time. But I have also learned to put the Lord first and to guide me in the right direction to stay on my positive track. I understand that I have a sinful nature and that I have sinful ways, but I pray that the Lord would help keep me on the right path.

I have learned a whole lot of stuff. I have learned a lot of spiritual things. Before I came to Advance Memphis I was veering away from the Lord. I always knew that I wanted a relationship with the Lord but I always kept straying away from him, but I have learned that this is because of my sinful nature. I have learned that God has always been faithful to me even when I was not faithful to him. He forgives me and calls me back to a good life with him because his mercies are new every morning.

I have learned not to stop with my high school diploma, but to add even more education. I know that even though I have roadblocks and my background may limit me, I have learned to keep going. I want to encourage my classmates to do the same. God’s Word says that he has a good plan for our lives. I don’t want us to forfeit that plan, so let’s accept his grace on our lives and work hard to accomplish our goals for our futures.

I’d like to thank Andrew who is not here at this time, the Advance Memphis staff, Danielle, and my classmates for being positive, encouraging people around me."

Marcus Stone

Jobs for Life graduate

How Individual Development Accounts Bring Hope

The way poverty is defined will dictate the appropriate response to impoverished households. If poverty is a lack of physical goods or money, then the answer is to simply give the individual things or money. If poverty is defined by a lack of education or improper thinking, then the answer is to give individuals information. If poverty is just a lack of opportunity, then the answer is to give people access–to employment, education, financial services, etc. Obviously, the problem is that poverty is not easily typified. It is complex, and its manifestations vary, often drastically, from context to context. Kenyan poverty looks much different than poverty in Memphis. However, both are real, and both are devastating.

As a Christian organization, Advance Memphis is deeply concerned about justice. We therefore find statistics like the following to be extremely disturbing:

Wolff, E. N. (2007). Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze. Working Paper No. 502. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. New York University.

If this were simply a monetary issue, it would be bad enough. But this growing disparity betrays some serious problems over the past 50 years. Behavioral economists suggest that incentives play a large part in facilitating the accumulation of assets. The middle and upper classes have access to incentives that the poor do not, such as tax incentivized retirement savings and the home mortgage interest tax deduction. According to the Center for Social Development at Washington University 90% of the benefits from these two tax policies go to households earning more than $50,000. Moreover, because of means-tested public assistance programs, there is a disincentive for poor households to build assets. This leaves them more likely to remain stuck in poverty.

Assets play four key roles in the life of every household. They:

1. provide a buffer against economic shocks, like job loss;

2. generate income;

3. generate more assets;

4. affect future outlook and thus current behavior.

The first three roles are fairly self explanatory. However, the final role has some unique implications. Think about it. If you have a good bit of home equity, some non-liquid financial assets, a good education, a car, college savings for your children and a retirement plan, how do you feel about the future? That question may be hard to answer and depend on other things going on in your life. However, it is certain that you feel better about the future than you would if you were in the same situation and had none of these assets. These assets provide hope of future economic survival, even thriving. And if “tomorrow” looks good, you are less likely to make choices today that endanger that future. However, if the future is bleak, your time horizons shorten and you become more focused immediate gratification.

Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) allow Advance Memphis to address a number of these issues at once. There is an incentive (the match) for individuals to save and create assets. But the goal is more than mere asset creation. If you have assets, but lack the knowledge to manage them well, they won’t do you much good. That is why, in order to be eligible, an individual must first graduate from the Jobs for Life Program which includes financial literacy education, and work for two months. Graduates then they have to save for at least six months before a withdrawal can be made. This program structure provides an opportunity to fuse knowledge and practice. When those come together, savers develop new long-run behaviors, which in the long term are much, much more valuable than $2,000.

brandon@advancememphis.org

Thoughts on a Friend's Life

At Advance, we hear a lot of life stories. The act of telling life stories is part of our Jobs for Life curriculum, and it's one of the most important ways that we build relationships in class, and begin developing the bonds of trust that are essential to the effectiveness of class. A lot of the stories we hear at Advance are tragic. Sometimes they're horrifying. We have no interest in exploiting our friends by dramatizing their lives and bandying their stories about for maximum impact.

But it's important to remember that we all have stories. When you see behavior that shocks you, it's rooted in a story. When you see anger that seems over the top, it's rooted in a story. Stories are not excuses, but they are reasons—and they are a part of us, as much as any physical attribute.

And so we bring you a story. One of many, but one that we think will touch your heart and remind all of us to see our neighbors for what they are: people with stories—and children of the King—a King who is bigger than our stories.

A Student's Story, In Her Own Words:

“As a kid growing up I was what you call a military bart (sic) My father was in the marines so we traveled from one place to another by the time I turned ten my mother had left my father and moved us to Memphis to stay with my grandmother [.] By the time I turned fourthteen (sic) my parents had divorced [.] During the divorce my mom began to use drugs crack cocaine so she sent me to stay with my father because she could no longer take care of me and my siblings [.] As time pasted (sic) my father remarried to his now wife of twenty years [.]

Now I’ve turned sixteen I was walking home from basketball practice I was attacked by five boys who kidnapped me they beat me and brutalty (sic) raped for three days not knowing if I would live or die I prayed that someone would come to my rescue [.]By the grace of God a homeless man found me laying in this abandon house laying in my own blood not knowing if I were dead or alive he kneeled down and touch my lifeless body he picked me up and took me to the nearest house where this elderly lady stayed who took me and called the police when they arrived I couldn’t see them because my eyes were swallowen (sic) but I could hear them say this the missing girl that we’ve been looking for [.] I was taken to the hospital where I stayed for two weeks while my body heeled my mom was at my beside (sic) praying to God that I get better [.]

Once I was released from the hospital I tired (sic) to commit suicide I tried to scrub my skin off my body because I felt so dirty and nasty during this [.] I had a nervous brake down which called to be hospitalized for months I’ve been stained for life thru this all this have made me cold hearted as hell [.] Andrew [Jobs for Life Instructor] this is my life story!!!!”

Andrew's Reponse:

I found the above homework assignment on my desk yesterday. Students were asked to draw or write out their life stories and prepare to share them with the rest of the class. When I read this note I closed the door to my office and crawled under my desk, where no one could see me through the window. As I hid from everyone else, I wept uncontrollably. This wasn’t the only terrible thing I had heard this week, but it was the last straw. Earlier someone else had told me she had arrived at her children’s father’s house with a gun in her purse ready to kill him, when she received a text message from me: “come to school.” I was stunned. My “random” text message prevented a murder as well as a dear friend from losing everything, including her 3 young children plus the unwanted child growing in her womb, for a life of prison. This same woman has had two teenage family members murdered in the past few months. She held one of them as they slowly died from the bullet wound. Coincidentally, I know the murderer—he was someone who I had been trying to help "escape the streets." There have been too many horror stories this week.

So now I meditate on the painful reality of life this side of heaven. This is a reality I never knew existed. Growing up, it seemed that everyone had a father to protect them. I thought everyone had a mother to love and affirm them. I didn’t know there was a different America—one where stories like the ones above are the norm, not the shocking exception. I think I need to be sobered to reality. Everything inside of me screams out to God, “why NOT me?” The life I’ve experienced so far is so radically different from the lives of my new friends. Why? It’s not fair! It’s not fair that my life has been handed to me, while my friends have only known such horrendous struggle.

Back to my friend’s homework. The last sentence haunts me the most. “Andrew this is my life story!!!!” Why does her story end at age 16? My friend is 39! What about the other 23 years of her life? What about her dropping out of high school? What about the abusive boyfriend who she feels like she can’t leave? What about her criminal background and her inability to find stable work? Now I get it. “Andrew this is my life story!!!!” Her story ends at age 16 because she has had no hope that her future will ever be anything different. The subsequent 23 years of her life have simply been an extension of the defining experiences of her childhood.

Now I wonder about this year and the next. I wonder about the next 39 years of her life. Will they also be defined by the quarantined experiences of life in the ghetto? My friend has heard the good news of the Kingdom of Jesus told in various ways nearly every day of the past month. She is also receiving free professional Christian counseling through our services. She is being told that Jesus wants to remove all of her shame; that her heavenly Father wants to comfort and embrace his beloved daughter; and that the Holy Spirit wants to give her a new life and a new identity where the old has truly passed away, and behold, new things have come. I wonder if she’ll accept this message. I wonder if she will experience true healing from all her disappointments in life. I wonder if she will believe in herself, and in her inherent value as one of God’s image bearers. I wonder if she’ll gain enough hope for her future to be one of the few adults who complete their GED. If she doesn’t, she won’t have the opportunity to pursue her dream of getting a trade from the nearby community college.


Because of the friends I've made at Advance, I am forever changed—some might say ruined. I know I can never return to the life I once knew, but I am so thankful for my new relationships. I am glad that I’m no longer blind to the injustices of our world and to my selfishness, which is daily being exposed. Like a magnetic force, I feel compelled to stop pouring myself out for my own comfort and luxury and to begin pouring myself out for the benefit of others. I don’t know what it is about identifying with other people’s brokenness, but somehow God is using it in my life to make the scriptures alive again, to give the gospel new power, and to confirm that the Christian calling of sacrificial service is an exciting and joyful calling. Like never before I pray with Jesus: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Andrew Vincent
Jobs for Life Program Coordinator
andrew@advancememphis.org

Letter from Prison

Late last week, Executive Director Steve Nash received the below letter from Shelby County Jail. He didn't recognize the name of the sender, but soon realized that it was from the cellmate of a recently incarcerated Jobs for Life grad. We were all encouraged by this letter, and by it's demonstration of the presence of the Holy Spirit in this jail cell.

Read the letter below*, and consider learning more about the links between prison, education, and poverty. Here are a couple starting places:

• A recent report from the NAACP, Misplaced Priorities, tracks a shift of state funds away from education and toward the criminal justice system.
• Check out the Justice Fellowship | Prison Fellowship website.

*names have been changed.


Hi Brother Nash,

How are you doing. I hope this letter find you bless and highly favored. I'm an inmate here at the Shelby County Jail, and I hope to be release in the next few weaks. I got a cellmate a couple of days ago, and we got to talking eventually about jobs, and he was telling me about the job he had before getting arrested and the program he attended to get the job and that it is Christian base.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I am 45 years old with a wife and 4 kids - 2 adults and 2 beautiful little girls, we live in the southeast area of Memphis, I've been addicted to crack cocaine for many years, my wife is a faithful God fearing woman, and I eventually got in the church and was doing good with my addiction and faithful to God. But about 2 months ago, I went back to my old ways and eventually started back using and eventually it led me to this charge. But even though I don't want to be locked up, I thank God for allowing me to get locked up instead of covered up, and I done had time to think about my life and how I need to totally surrender to God.

I have always work even though I had an addiction problem, and have been a certified forklift operator with up to date license. And even though I have charges on my background I've been bless to be with a couple of temp. service that send me on jobs that don't require background. I ask God to bless me with a cellmate who wont be in here trying to smoke, up rapping all night, talking about sinful things that I'm not into anymore and He did just that. Since I been here, I confess my sin to God I've repented to him, I'm faithful to our daily bible study. I pray an dread my word daily. I want to have a renewed mind when I leave here like the word talks about in Romans 12. I want to have a mind of Christ, so I know in order to begin to start to live as God wants me to live I have to do what Matthew 6:33 says.

I just thank God for the mind to seek him, but when Brother Johnson told me that you all program was Christian base that kind of touch me because that's what I need to be around people in my work environment that love the Lord. I know that I've been chosen and called by God, and I feel he sent this brother here in my cell to tell me about you all program, I think it will be a start to the ministry God is calling me in, and when I get out and contact you guys I'm praying I qualify for you all program. I understand that I will have to travel a great distance to my class daily but God and me and my wife will make that happen.

Brother Johnson was telling me that you all have a outreach program I would love to get involve in that, that's my heart desire is for God to clean me up from all kinds of sin like jail, drugs, cigarettes, adultery, etc. etc. so he can use me to help men and women who's going through life struggles I have been through. And let them know if God delivered me he can deliver you.

I thank you for taking time to read this letter. I pray that this letter be a beginning of a Godly relationship with myself and Advance Memphis. Oh yeah the brother told me it would be okay to tell you his name who told me about the program, his name is Stan Johnson. He's a good brother he talks and act like he is ready to surrender to God also. I've asked him to come to our bible study and he said he will. I had two bibles and he's been reading one of them, but anyway thanks for taking time trying to read this bad handwriting. God bless you and your family. If it's God will, we will meet soon.

William Edwards III.

It's All About Relationships

Early on in the Jobs for Life class, Brandon draws a picture on the board of a person surrounded by a “web” of relationships with God, others, the physical world, and the self. At Advance we believe that poverty happens when sin damages any of these relationships in any of our lives. This means that sin isn’t just sexual immorality or drunkenness; natural disasters, sickness, systems of injustice, and failing schools are all the result of sin. The picture of a person caught in a web of broken relationships reveals the pervasiveness of sin in all our lives.

But it also shows us the pervasiveness of redemption. When Jesus “makes His blessings known far as the curse is found,” He not only heals a person’s relationship with God, He begins to heal that person’s relationships with the physical world (through work!), the person’s own self, and with others. Springs of living water, as Jesus put it, spring up and overflow abundantly into our lives as Christ heals everything that’s sick and restores everything that’s broken.


What does this “big view” of sin and redemption mean for our daily lives? First of all, it reminds us that we’re all broken and in need of Jesus in every area of our lives. And it reminds us that when Jesus gets us right with the Father, He also begins to get us right with others, even and especially those neighbors who are different, who we don’t know, and who we may not even like. It means that reconciliation becomes a crucial part of what it means to be a Jesus follower. Consider this quote from When Helping Hurts:

Our perspective should be less about how we are going to fix the materially poor and more about how we can walk together, asking God to fix both of us.


And this one from Ephesians 2, which speaks about the unexpected reconciliation Christ brought between Jews and Gentiles in the early church:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility . . . His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility . . . For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. . . in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

We believe that Christ “has committed to us [this] message of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5:19). And that means that we’re called to engage relationally with people who used to live on the “other side of the tracks of hostility,” too. It means that rich and poor, male and female, black and white MUST find healing in Jesus TOGETHER.


No matter who you are, reconciliation between you and God never happens outside of a relationship. In the same way, racial and socio-economic reconciliation CANNOT happen without real person-to-person relationships. If you don’t have relationships like that, come volunteer at Advance. Staff and volunteers alike can testify to how the relationships built through Advance have helped this gospel of reconciliation flourish in their own lives. Come join us, and let’s experience Christ’s kingdom together.

Michael Rhodes
michael@advancememphis.org

March 5 News

ADVANCE ALUMNA GOES FULL TIME AT MATA We're proud to share that Sharlene Washington, who graduated from the first class ever held at Advance Memphis, has been hired for a full time position at MATA. Sharlene is full time, with benefits. Please pray for Sharlene and her family as she transitions to this new role.

STUDENTS ACCEPTED TO MIDSOUTH COMMUNITY COLLEGE Several students are applying to Mid-South Community College to pursue a Certificate of Proficiency in Chemical Plant Operations and Processes. We're proud of Tonya Harris and Christiana Brown, who have already received acceptance letters. Several of the students of the students who are interested in this program (full scholarships are available) face transportation challenges. Please pray that roadblocks will be removed for those who are ready and willing to pursue education.

PSALM 55: 9-11 9 Lord, confuse the wicked, confound their words, for I see violence and strife in the city. 10 Day and night they prowl about on its walls; malice and abuse are within it. 11 Destructive forces are at work in the city; threats and lies never leave its streets.

GRADUATION CELEBRATION Our first class of 2011 graduated last week and our volunteer photographer, Gretchen Shaw, has uploaded pics from the celebration. Slide show below!

First Class of 2011 Graduates

We are so proud of this group of 11 graduates. All of our classes overcome significant roadblocks to reach their graduation, but this group has really worked hard to rise above their struggles and accomplish their goals.

This was also our first graduation to honor grads who have recently received their GEDs. Tonya Harris and Christiana Brown were there (pictured above), and were a great inspiration for today's grads who are still working toward their GEDs.

CED HARRIS BEGINS SAVING FOR CAR

Ced Harris, Jobs for Life grad and UWT Logistics employee, opened his IDA this week to begin saving for a car. We commend Ced's commitment to his job and his family. He'll save $1500 and receive $3000 in matching funds. Watch a video, below, to hear Ced talk about his plan!