Realism is Loyalty

Grand Rapids Community Foundation has been striving to create more equitable investments and inclusive partnerships in part by supporting more grassroots organizations led by people of color. Realism Is Loyalty is a grassroots nonprofit service provider offering mentoring and life coaching blended with mental health and substance abuse supports in the Baxter community. A recent grant award from the Community Foundation supported their Each One Teach One program, an intensive mentoring program focused on parent engagement for youth returning to the community from residential placement, jail or prison. This program supports youth mental health and mentoring by pairing them with an adult advocate with similar lived experiences. This helps youth navigate their psychosocial development, economic realities and self-discipline.

RIL’s approach to building meaningful relationships is unique: it purposefully hires people with familiarity in the penal system so that shared experience, not sympathy, helps build deep relationships. They pride themselves on working through a culturally relatable and competent lens and emphasize that they meet people where they are at. “One of the things I know just from personal experience: you can’t teach me; you can’t show me anything unless I’m open to it. And if I’m open to it, just walk alongside me, and, if I stumble a bit, correct me,” says JD Chapman, Jr., RIL executive director. “The struggles these families have, they ain’t new. I’ve been through a lot of the same things that they’ve been through.”

RIL’s mission statement is to empower, encourage and strengthen in spite of story, system or choice. This is lived out through the relationships they build with their youth participants. “Do your best to be your best,” JD says to RIL participants and families. “If you invest in yourself, other people will invest in you.” RIL mentors befriend participants. Mentors are there for the 2 a.m. calls and are honest when people need to correct their behavior. They have seen how their relationships with participants help to reduce instances of crime and theft. RIL is leveraging resources from our grant partnership to create an evidence-based model to demonstrate impact.

RIL staff develop these trust-based, genuine friendships and then invite the entire family into the process. They believe that everyone in the household should be involved in the programming. They understand that individual behavioral and academic problems are primarily symptoms of systemic poverty and political, economic, health and housing inequities. That’s why they create personalized approaches for each family’s specific journey. “What matters to me the most is what the families that we work with, what’s their opinion? What do they have to say? Cause they the experts of their own trajectory. We just here to help and guide them along the way,” JD says.

When discussing systemic injustices and how RIL sees its role in disrupting systems, JD says that Realism Is Loyalty focuses on the impact they can make on their neighborhood. “I got a small organization that can be very, very impactful to a small group of people. That provides something that a lot of these families haven’t experienced ever with service providers. We pride ourselves in that,” says JD. “But at the same time, we gotta push back to both funders as well as government because the grassroot organizations are really the organizations that are effective, but they get the least funding.”

JD challenges the Community Foundation and other nonprofits and businesses who have discussed their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in recent years to make sure it is not a trend but lasting, major change: “Grand Rapids historically hasn’t been an equitable place. So why would we believe it would just all of a sudden become equitable now?” he wonders. “Self-evaluation and correction is great. But just because you done some self-reflection and identified some things that you probably can do better, that doesn’t erase everything from the past. Moving forward, yeah, let’s do better. But what does ‘let’s do better’ look like in terms of outcomes and impact?”