Javonii Merritt-Hunter was coming off her fifth concussion from rugby when COVID-19 hit. School became more difficult. She couldn’t stand the lights. 

Depression and anxiety set in. She was sleeping 15 to 18 hours a day, and she couldn’t keep up with school.

“I was letting my future slip away,” she said. “It was a really hard time after two concussions. For a period of time, I definitely thought that college or education was done.”

Opportunity youth-focused nonprofit rebrands, expands mission

Then came The Collective Blueprint.

The organization is one part of an attempted solution to the city’s crime and poverty problems, a solution beyond the traditional approaches tried by leaders in charge. 

Opportunities for ‘opportunity youths’

Merritt-Hunter, 23, tried to pay for school out of pocket when she couldn’t play rugby during the pandemic. Her athletic scholarship wasn’t active.

“I want to go back to college,” Merritt-Hunter said. “I plan to get my degree, but this program is actually helping me venture out into different things and help me get the assistance to work my way back to college.”

The Collective Blueprint works with “opportunity youth,” a term that describes those ages 16 to 24 who aren’t in school or in the workforce. 

Those involved in The Collective Blueprint are actually 18 to 30. It estimates there are as many as 45,000 opportunity youth in the city in a variety of its programs, such as Code Crew and a newly launched journalism program.

“What we are all about is increasing socioeconomic mobility,” said Sabrina Dawson, vice president of programs at The Collective Blueprint. “And we want to do that for opportunity youth by building pathways to thriving careers. We’re kind of about eliminating barriers so that young adults have the power to live their best lives, the tools to make that a reality.” 

The organization is one of many trying to increase the access to opportunity for Memphians — one of the toughest cities for upward socioeconomic mobility.

Tipping Point: Code Crew focuses on diversity in tech

“The things that we hear from our (students) are wanting access and wanting access to an opportunity,” Dawson said. “If I am trying to get my education and further myself or further my career, but I’m in danger of being evicted or my lights are being cut off, I have a choice to make,” she said.

“Do I go work at this temp job so I can like keep these lights on and support my family? Or do I sacrifice and go to school, and not make money? 

“And those are really tough decisions when you’re thinking about day-to-day survival. To that end, we believe in investing in our young adults, so they do get a monthly stipend from us.”

When she first got to the program, Merritt-Hunter thought it was too good to be true.

“At first, I thought it was a scam,” she said. “There’s no way someone’s going to pay me to get my education and offer all these other classes and transportation assistance.”

Merritt-Hunter has completed the program already, working in the Tech 901 field offered by The Collective Blueprint. She is certified as a hardware technician, but she’s gone back for more classes. 

“I want to go back to college. I plan to get my degree, but this program is actually helping me venture out into different things and help me get the assistance to work my way back to college.”

Javonii Merritt-Hunter

Her husband completed the program with her. She said they have both been able to use the skills from the program and parlayed it into greater wages and moving into a safer neighborhood.

She realizes it’s tough for people to reconnect and move forward with their goals, especially in a city crippled with poverty and generational disinvestment in Black neighborhoods. 

People are working hard but are still without money, she noted.

“I didn’t grow up in the best of neighborhoods,” she said. “I feel like some things will really change you.

“It’s a continuous cycle of parents and grandparents who have not been given the proper tools to succeed. And if you go through that many generations of depression and lack of hope and lack of finances, you can’t expect anything to flourish from it because you haven’t planted the seeds.”

Crime and the cycle of poverty

It took two months for the pendulum to swing.

The citizens of Memphis — still reckoning with the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of multiple police officers — heard city council members' plans for the city.

In a month’s time, discussions on police reform turned to how much more funding to give them.

“Mr. Budget chairman, I look forward to specifically looking into police recruitment, but specifically beefing up certain task forces, especially auto theft,” council member Frank Colvett said during a March 21 committee meeting.

Long-term problems drive protests, nonprofit leader says

Then came the larger news of the day — the council will consider giving $15 million in additional funds for the police department to increase salaries to help recruit roughly 600 additional police officers. The move would require a tax increase.

The council also proposed an additional $15 million for social programs, broken down into thirds. It would go in thirds to the city’s affordable housing trust fund, the Memphis Area Transit Authority and to youth programming at libraries, parks and community centers.

While The Collective Blueprint will receive funds from the city, it did not tell council members how the organization works to opportunity youth — there wasn’t enough time.

District Attorney General Steve Mulroy has been in office for seven months and is already being accused of not being “tough on crime,” something Mayor Jim Strickland has focused on heavily during his administration.

During Strickland’s tenure, at least 64% of the city’s budget has been for police and fire, with a high of 72% for fiscal 2021. 

But crime rates have continued to rise.

A rape kit backlog and the dismissal of lawsuits against the city for failing to test them, unsolved murders stretching back decades and low clearance rates among the Memphis Police Department haven’t been brought up by officials when looking at crime issues.

The District Attorney’s office officials did not respond to requests for comment.

“What is safety?” asks Cardell Orrin, executive director of Stand For Children. “Do I feel safe? Do I have a house or place to sleep? Am I secure in terms of food, lifestyle, food security? Is there access to transit so I get to jobs or education? For a child, do I have parents who don’t have to work multiple jobs so they can be around me more often?”

He said those kinds of issues have to be “reimagined” because current approaches to dealing with crime are not working.

A lack of socioeconomic mobility is something that has plagued Memphis for years. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2014 dubbed Memphis’ lack of mobility among the worst in the nation.

Since the study, the situation hasn’t improved much. A 2020 study by the Sycamore Institute shows that only 4% of low-income children in Shelby County move to high-income adulthood. 

Program gets NBA assist in training students for software developer jobs

“A child who grew up in a low-income home in Midtown had about a 16% chance of becoming a high-income adult,” the study said. “One mile away in North Memphis, a low-income child had less than a 1% chance. The odds of moving from middle- to high-income were 19% for kids from Midtown and less than 1% for those from North Memphis.”

Just one arrest of a family member has been shown to drastically reduce household assets and increase debt. While someone with a record isn’t excluded from participating in The Collective Blueprint programming, it does make the work difficult.

Like Merritt-Hunter, Chyniece Matthews, 26, has found the program to be intense but rewarding after starting classes in January.

She’s trying to find a new track after being laid off during the onset of the pandemic from a New York marketing firm.

She had planned on heading back to New York for a new job when a medical emergency derailed those plans. 

Being a dancer with an arts background for most of her life, joining the program and focusing on the Code Crew program has been an adjustment.

“I’m kind of seeing, like, some type of crossover between the arts and tech,” Matthews said. “And there being an opportunity for me to look for an interesting job when I finish the program.

“So something maybe in VR or multimedia or something like that. I’m not sure exactly. It’s intense. Not gonna lie. Especially coming from an arts background.”

Matthews found The Collective Blueprint through Code Crew after her grandmother mentioned it to her.

“I felt supported in any way that you could possibly think of. They make it known that they will help me get the resources that I need. So if I need a therapist, they’ll help me figure out how to do that. Financially, they’ll help me find resources for that in education,” Matthews said. 

“We’ve met future employers, we had a yoga class. We talked about what social justice looks like in Memphis and how can we support our community.”

Like Merritt-Hunter, Matthews feels as if there is a disconnect between what she sees and hears and what leaders have decided to do.

She said if crime is continuing to rise, it tells her there must be deeper issues at play than those being addressed by the people in charge. 

“Like they don’t have the resources they need,” she said. “... People are stealing because their basic needs aren’t being met.”