Today we’d like to introduce you to Flavian Prince.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Flavian. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was in Rio de Janeiro’s Federal Library playing with kids in front of a fountain. I was supposed to be inside mining early colonial artifacts on race formation but I could not help notice that these happy homeless children looked like me in a sea of folks that did not. I decided to stop pursuing my doctorate in history, returned to the states and studied education. I wanted to teach kids in the foster system due to my brief but impactful time there, and so I ended up at a residential therapeutic day school in Urbana. It changed my life and I knew I wanted to remain in education, but I also knew I wanted to work and try to solve issues dealing with a demographic that did not have much of a chance. The therapeutic students ended up in lifelong care, suicide, jail or at home more often than not. I watched middle schoolers coming from comfortable jails to schools to homes that often did not have basic water and electricity due to the section 8 rule changes from Chicago to Champaign.
When I inevitably moved up to Chicago, I went after teaching in the lowest performing schools and began to understand the policies dictating the lives of these children. I made a documentary with some of my 8th graders and a friend of mine and from their I was determined to not let any fall through the cracks. I taught some more, did some more administration and then quit everything to try to create a pipeline for students that do not have a chance. I started the business in 2010 on the South Side of Chicago. My goal was to create a curriculum system targeting the most vulnerable youth of our city. This led to a host of other creative endeavors that has spread across the Midwest and back to Chicago. I ran charter schools for alternative students to school reform under emergency managers. Yet, through all of that work, there is still millions of disengaged students crying our for someone to do something completely different. This is where META24 came from. We came up with the concept from really listening to students over the years. Students needed a different approach to school that was hands on and preparing them for what they needed now which was a job. How do you combine school work and job preparation for students who have shown a continual lack of buy-in from our traditional system? When I started at the therapeutic home, the principal allowed me to create hotel simulators to train the kids to turn a room over and we started a car detailing business. We opened up a garden in Halsted and ran an after-school program and a cafe for kids needing homework help and a meal as part of the curriculum. All of those things were beneficial and helped but it had to become a system that others could wrap their heads around. We gutted the first floor of our schools and created incubators for our students. We then had to rewrite a curriculum to meet our students where they were and get them to where they needed to be. But each module had to be around work-based learning and entrepreneurial endeavors that either created the executive and soft skills students needed or led to an actual job. It took a couple of years but it worked. It was so successful that the META24 students opened up their own retail shop called MZUZI which means to Innovate in Swahili. The store is a showcase of artifacts that changed the narrative that drop outs/Opt Outs/can do more than credit recovery programs, etc. We were successful in working with Get In Chicago to extend the day of the program to include some of the 60k students who are not working or in school in the Chicago area. The students sustained a retail store in Austin for a year making over $25k when most of the customers did not know it was made by students.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Mmmm. Not so much. We are talking about working with black and brown and white poor adolescents. Shifting mindsets for students was challenging but welcomed. A convincing bureaucracy that this was better for a population susceptible to murder, addiction, trafficking, jail, boredom, hopelessness, etc. was impossible. As the district bleeds students, the discourse is on graduation rates. They found out that many of the out of school and out of work youth have high school diplomas. Why this is a new discovery is a head scratcher but this is what happens when a population is a number. We know they are behind. They are in many ways unemployable when they come to us and we do very little to prepare them. CBO’s work on basic skills most of the time and the deeper programs cannot handle the real street kids nor the ones that have simply rejected the current state of our institutions. Despite statistics showing a continual rise in attendance, academic achievement, a reduction in recidivism, etc, it was all about kids in seats getting as many credits. This is why so many simply choose not to walk in a school door period.
Please tell us about META24 and MZUZI.
META24 is an innovative curriculum designed to build habits and teach core and workplace skills to disengaged youth. It is built for a particular demographic that would not typically have access to this information or the labs that we build for them. META stands for Make Enterprise Teach and Achieve. It has been described as a Montessori for the disengaged. We are starting to move away from the idea of this as a school. While it is in River Rouge, MI and a couple of other places as a lab driven curriculum, the goal is to create smaller sites for kids to access all of the time. As mentioned before the students created MZUZI. It holds all of the businesses that the students started. People ask why don’t you build it downtown so that you can sell more products and our response is that schools should be a conduit for community development. They have not seen black-owned businesses that make really nice things such as laser cut personalized puzzles and high-end soaps and lotions. But this is what they have built in their neighborhood. Once a student gets to one of the five levels in META24 they are allowed to sell in the store. They are given a microloan that they have to pay back. This is part of the mantra hanging over the door of the store: Break the Cycle. The first year, kids would not invest back into their business after they broke even. The second year, they invested back in but many did not continue which was ok because they were all working somewhere. What I am most proud of is, how kids are delaying gratification and are investing extra time into the store and the curriculum without adults pushing them. This has led to folks from outside of Chicago investing in them to open up stores in Detroit and other areas.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Returning back home from foster care. It was not easy and my family was never the same but it was a good feeling eventually. I lived with my grandma and was completely removed mentally from school and everything else. It shaped who I was and how I thought from that point forward and I believe it informs a lot about what I do today.
Contact Info:
- Address: 5459 W Chicago Ave.
- Website: mzuzi.solutions is the website for MZUZI meta24.org is the one for…META
- Email: contact@meta24.org
- Facebook: mzuzi @mzuzi.solutions
- Twitter: @meta24change
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
