Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt DeMateo.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Matt. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
At 18 years old, I began as a freshman at Moody Bible Institute downtown. I was an international studies major and thought I was going to do development work overseas. Immediately I got involved in Cabrini Green and began mentoring. I fell in love with the city and with working with youth. Early on as a student, I started dating my now wife, and we got involved at New Life Community Church in Little Village. We started working with children and running the after-school program, La Semilla. A few years in, we began working with high school youth. In 2004, we got married, and both thought we would be headed overseas soon. We moved into Little Village and continued to mentor youth in the neighborhood.
In 2006, we joined a missions agency with the plan of working with street kids in Brazil. We went to visit and after our trip to Brazil, we felt unsettled. I was asked by New Life to become the full-time youth pastor. We accepted and I quit my job in marketing downtown and started working full time in Little Village.
In a neighborhood where there are 50,000 youth under the age of 25, the opportunities for pastoring youth were endless. As head Pastor Francisco “Paco” Amador and I looked at our neighborhood we found that a local community development agency, Enlace Chicago, had created a quality of life plan. This plan was a 50+ page document that outlined a 5-year plan to improve Little Village. The plan included ideas such as park space, education, business, violence prevention, and more. In the middle of the document, there was a map of the entire community with over 90 of the influential “power players”. Some of these included churches, social service providers, education and jobs, health care providers, and government service agencies. In the list of 11 churches, New Life Community Church was nowhere to be found. We began to realize that the building at 27th and Lawndale was not recognized as a church. We were called New Life “Community” Church but having absolutely nothing to do with our community. That had to change.
In the first year full time, we began to reach gang members. It was in the fall of 2007 that we were introduced to the local probation officer. He asked if we wanted to mentor gang involved youth on probation. So it was in November of 2007 that the Urban Life Skills Program was born. We started with 10 gangs involved youth on probation, all with gun cases, and had 10 volunteer mentors. In the first 3 months, one of the youth completely left the gang and turned himself around, another youth caught a murder case and is still locked up today. We realized that the stakes were high, but the work was so important, so we continued. The work in Chicago began to grow, so we decided to stay local.
The first 3 years of Urban Life Skills was all volunteer run. We worked with 200 gang-involved youth on probation. After 3 years, we were approached by Cook County Juvenile Probation Department asking us what we were doing with youth. They said we had almost double the success rate of other similar programs. We were doing life on life mentoring with youth, providing a safe space, and showing unconditional love, grace, and support. That was our model… nothing sophisticated or fancy, just long-term life together mentoring.
We received our first funding from Chicago Public Schools through the Culture of Calm Program. We went from all volunteer to hiring a few staff. It was a high learning curve. Over the year, we worked hard with the 40 highest risk students at Farragut High School. At the end of the year, CPS told us they were cutting back the number of neighborhoods they were going to fund, but that Little Village would still be included. They also mentioned that they were changing the model from community-based to school-based, from 1 mentor to 10 youth to 1 mentor to 25 youth, and from community-based violence prevention outcomes to school-based outcomes.
This change happened right around the time that we lost our first youth to street violence. David Lopez, one of our original 10 youth was stabbed to death in June of 2011. It was the first funeral that I ever had to lead… burying this young man in front of a crowd of 300+ people including many Latin Kings. CPS told us we had a week to make a decision if we wanted to continue under the new conditions. It was the same week I buried David. After thinking and praying, we turned down $100,000 because we didn’t want to change who we were for money. This began the next phase of Urban Life Skills.
After 5 years in, David’s younger siblings asked us what they had to do to get on probation. We realized these young people thought they had to get in trouble to get the resources they needed. We decided to start working with younger youth. We now had both prevention and intervention mentoring. A year later we hired Benny Estrada and Jorge Roque. This added the expertise we needed for street intervention. Their work with us was highlighted on the front page of the Chicago Tribune in May of 2017. The article can be found here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/peacemakers/ct-little-village-met-20170421-story.html.
In 2012 our world was rocked again. In March of 2012, Chicago had a very warm week. In the middle of the week, on the block behind our house, some of our youth were hanging out on a porch. An opposite gang member walked past and shot at the porch. Two of our youth were hit. One was shot in the head and one in the chest. We went to the hospital like we always do. After multiple hours of surgery, the young man who was shot in the head survived. The bullet was lodged next to his eye and the doctors couldn’t remove it. We found out that 19-year-old Jonny was killed… another youth lost to street violence. We began helping mom with funeral arrangements. 3 days later on Saturday of the same week, I got news of another shooting.
Six-year-old Aliyah Shell was on the porch with her mom and younger sister when a truck drove past and shot toward the house. The bullet struck Aliyah and she died. Aliyah was one of my daughter’s good friends. Another tragedy. I had to tell my then 5-year-old daughter that her friend had been killed. Five-year-olds can’t process death… at the funeral, she asked how they got the body back from heaven. For the next 3 months, she regularly told me to check that the front door was locked, that we couldn’t hang out on the porch, and that we had to be careful. It was at this moment that I fully realized what almost all young people on the south and west sides of Chicago faced every day. My work word and home life came crashing together. We continue to live and serve in Little Village and love our community.
Now, 10 years later we continue to work with youth on probation. We now serve every single youth that gets on probation in Little Village. We also mentor over 200 youth in 7th-12th grade. Our model is long-term mentoring, averaging 24+ months for each mentoring match. We are doing restorative justice, peace circles, and in-school mentoring, street-based intervention, and gang mediations in IYC Chicago. Our sports-based programming has grown significantly and we now program over 1500 youth a year through sports including softball, football, soccer, running, volleyball, boxing, baseball, and more. Our after-school education programming reaches 200 young people in K-8th grade in Little Village and Humboldt Park. In 2016, we were awarded the top mentoring program in the state of IL and in 2017 our sports-based worked was recognized by Beyond Sport with the international Sports for Peace and Social Justice award.
For the last 5 years, I have been the Executive Director of New Life Centers of Chicagoland, the 501C3 non-profit of New Life Community Church. We have gone from all volunteer to a staff of 36. We now work in Little Village and Humboldt Park and are expanding to the Midway area. Altogether, we impact over 2000 youth annually through mentoring, education, and sports. I am part of multiple citywide and state collaborations including the IL Juvenile Justice Commission, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) citywide Exec team, the Community Restorative Justice Hubs, Communities Partnering 4 Peace, and other local neighborhood collaboratives.
I live with my wife and 4 kids in Little Village. We love our neighborhood. It has been an amazing place to raise a family and is full of life, culture, and beauty. Our kids are in Chicago Public Schools and we love it. I run the local Little League, am president of our local school council, and advocate for resources for our neighbors. Little Village is an amazing community with great leaders, community-based agencies, collaboration, and the best food in the city. My goal is to provide hope and healing to youth across Chicagoland both locally in Little Village and Humboldt Park as well as catalyzing violence prevention and intervention across the city. Our passion is life on life mentoring. 18 years later, I continue to do the work I love and am excited to see the movement continue to grow!
Has it been a smooth road?
I laid out some of the challenges in my story, but there are always challenges. Some of the major challenges include:
– Violence in our neighborhoods. Our team has buried over 100 young people over the last 20+ years. We are seeing amazing things happen, but losing young people is never easy.
– Lack of resources – Our community faces the challenge of having enough resources to cover the tens of thousands of youth.
– Trauma. Our young people, families, and staff are constantly facing traumatic experiences. There aren’t many resources to help provide the support needed to deal with this trauma.
– Collaboration. We work hard to build bridges, not walls. In a historically divided city, this is an uphill battle. We have made great strides in the last 10 years, but it is a major challenge.
There are so many challenges, but these are a few of them.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
New Life Centers of Chicagoland, NFP, which was established in 2005 to connect youth and young adults with Christ and community through mentoring, education, and sports. New Life Centers operates sites in the Little Village, Humboldt Park, and Midway neighborhoods of Chicago. Each site is unique and is designed to respond to specific needs and requests identified by the members of the communities they serve. All sites work alongside community partners to create solutions that fit each individual neighborhood, adapt as neighborhood needs change, and ultimately transform each community into places where every person can thrive and fulfill his or her full human potential.
New Life Centers of Chicagoland‘s Urban Life Skills Program (ULS) is an intensive, community-based mentoring program for youth ages 12 to 24 in the Little Village neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. There are two target demographics of the ULS program: gang-involved youth on probation and at-risk youth referred through local schools and community agencies.
Serving these two populations allows ULS to holistically engage both violence prevention and intervention in response to identified community needs. ULS began in November of 2007 when we forged a relationship with a neighborhood juvenile probation officer who asked us to provide services to gang-involved adolescent males on probation. A partnership was then made between Cook County Juvenile Court and New Life Centers to provide at-risk youth with mentoring and supportive services. From a ten-week trial servicing ten male youth on probation with ten volunteer mentors, the ULS Program has expanded to a 24-month program, has served over 826 community youth, and now has a team of 28 volunteer mentors and 36 staff.
In May 2013, ULS also began violence prevention programming to mentor youth referred by local schools. We began our violence prevention work as a response to younger siblings of our youth on probation asking, “How do I get on probation so I can get a mentor?”—exemplifying the paradox that “many at-risk youth needing services are unable to receive them without entering into the juvenile justice system.”
The core of our program is mentoring in individual, group, and team contexts. In addition to mentoring, we offer ten weekly program sessions that address substance abuse, life skills (like financial literacy or cooking), violence prevention, gang intervention, health education, and sports-based youth development. We also provide court advocacy, educational advocacy, family support services, youth employment, and service learning opportunities.
We offer these wraparound services to youth based on need, with the highest-risk, justice-involved youth receiving all of the aforementioned services through two days per week of programming, a minimum of two mentoring contacts per week, as well as advocacy and accompaniment at every required court date. Our holistic program model enables us to fulfill our mission: to provide mentoring and advocacy to guide youth toward a new life and a new direction. We envision Little Village’s youth and families transformed by hope, becoming men and women of character to create a flourishing, unified neighborhood.
We provided intensive mentoring to 92 youth in 2016, with 3,879 mentoring sessions. Youth averaged over 28 months of mentoring contact from their start date, an increase from 2015’s previous average of 17, with an average of 5 mentoring sessions per month. 87.6% of youth had at least two one-on-one mentoring contacts per month. In addition to mentoring, medium- and high-risk youth attended an average of 10.64 hours of after-school programming per month. 67% of eligible youth successfully completed the terms of their probation according to the measure of the Juvenile Probation Department.
Note: a more meaningful measure would exclude technical violations from this number, and instead define recidivism only as youth entering deeper into the justice system. Over 60% of gang-involved youth have discussed detachment from the gang with staff members. In 2016, Urban Life Skills engaged over 500 at-risk and gang-affiliated youth, ages 12-24, in reconciliation, peace-making, and community-building through sports-based youth development. In 2017 thus far, Urban Life Skills has engaged over 375.
We are extremely proud of our team of local staff from the community. We believe that the answer to the challenges of our neighborhood lies within the community itself. So we focus on building local leaders and developing them as we work in our communities.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I love the city of Chicago. It is amazingly diverse, hard-working, and a gateway to the Midwest. It is a city of neighborhoods. Every one showing the amazing beauty and diversity of cultures, food, and giftings.
I would highly recommend it. It’s not a perfect place, but the advantages definitely outweigh the challenges.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2657 S. Lawndale Chicago, IL 60623
- Website: www.newlifecenters.org
- Phone: 312-343-0642
- Email: mattd@newlifecenters.org
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewLifeCenters/
Image Credit:
Peter Nickeas, Chicago Tribune
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