Bringing back what works: L.E.A.D. Center for Youth

By Community Foundation staff

In 2007, Kelli Stewart and her husband, former Chicago Cubs outfielder C.J. Stewart, had an idea: Create an organization that uses sports – specifically, baseball and tennis – to teach Black children in the City of Atlanta to dodge, what the couple calls, the three curveballs that threaten youth success: crime, poverty and racism.

Seventeen years later, their nonprofit offers year-round programming starting in third-grade through high school, and is hitting home runs. L.E.A.D. Center For Youth currently operates out of a 5500-square foot facility in the West End and has a roster of 200 student-athletes, with plans to expand to 500 over the next five years. We talked to Kelli about L.E.A.D. and sports-based youth development (SYBD), the cornerstone of L.E.A.D.’s programming, designed to teach skills to help student-athletes succeed not just on the field or on the court, but also in life.  Following are excerpts from that conversation.

L.E.A.D. offers year-round programming in two sports—tennis and baseball—and your focus is on what you describe as “bringing back what worked.” Can you talk about what that means?

You have to look at it from an economic standpoint, from a community standpoint and also from a personal standpoint. C.J. was born in 1976, and Atlanta had a very robust parks and recreation system at that time in baseball. We had about 8 to 10 teams at one time at each age level at Cascade Youth Organization— a very vibrant park in Southwest Atlanta.. In order for parks like that to survive, you have to have a really extensive volunteer network – families, parents who are able to have the schedules to volunteer after a 9-to-5 job to make these systems work.

But you look at what happened to the Black community around that time—the crack epidemic, mass incarceration—and so our communities have been gutted of the precious human resource that you need, first and foremost, to make that happen.

One of [C.J.’s] first coaches – was Mr. Emmett Johnson, who was the Board chair for the APS school board back in the day. Coach Emmett was the one who helped him learn how to field the ball, helped him learn how to throw a ball. Now, kids are paying for private instruction where, if you have the money, you’re paying anywhere from $50 to $150 an hour to pay to learn that, so that development piece has been gutted, as well. That’s where we come in to play—to bring back what was working.

Please explain what sports-based youth development (SBYD) is and some of the impacts you’ve seen in young people who have gone through the program.

SBYD is the intentional use of sports to develop outcomes in youth that put them on the pathway to making a healthy transition into adulthood. While traditional sports programs tend to focus on competition and winning only, SBYD places that competition and performance on the same level as social emotional learning outcomes. So you bring all of those frameworks from sports skill development to the evidence-based approach of positive youth development, which basically says, if we surround children with good environments consistently, frequently, at a high dosage, we can expect some positive outcomes to happen in their lives.

At L.E.A.D., we track seven capacities – some people call them competencies – and we do this with our monitoring and evaluation partner, Hello Insight, with funding that has come from the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta through the Heisman Trophy Fund, which gives us access to Hello Insight. These competencies are the building blocks for student achievement; these are the building blocks for youth to have a healthy life. –A lot of those building blocks don’t exist in the classroom—they do exist in this environment of SBYD. What we’ve seen is, within one program cycle, our youth have shown gains in at least three of those capacities.—- Just imagine if that child continues to progress in our programs.

You have an event coming up on February 23 where the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta will be named a Major League Citizen. Tell us about this event.

Our annual State of L.E.A.D. Community Convening Event is a way for us to connect with the community at large, our partners, parents, our youth, funders, just to let everyone know what’s going on new with L.E.A.D. This year, we have some of our student athletes who will be present to give our guests a “day in the life” of their experience being a part of the LEAD organization. 

We put so much emphasis in this country on professional athletes; however, it’s the real people present every day in the community that our kids see when they get up in the morning, from the people in their household holding it down for them, to the bus driver who is making sure they’re picked up every morning, to the person in the cafeteria, to the janitor at school, to the teacher to the principal, to coaches … to the funders like the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, that’s bringing this spotlight – to SBYD. That’s why we selected the Foundation for our Major League Citizen award because it takes people like you, people like us, to make our communities work every day.

To learn more about L.E.A.D. or SYBD, visit their website.