20 years of living The Dream

Jean Powell examined the pool table as she helped a younger player figure out his next shot.

A few minutes later, it was time for a basketball game in the adjacent gym. The former Fort Vancouver Trapper ran the court, playing defense and grabbing a rebound and passing to an open teammate.

That’s part of her job as teen coordinator at the Boys & Girls Club in Hazel Dell, working with students who are in grades six and up. While activities can get kids in the door, she wants to help them get a shot at things besides basketball and pool.

“We have a college prep program,” Powell said in her office in the Clinton and Gloria John Clubhouse. “A lot of kids don’t think (college) is for them,” she said. But Powell reminds them that “they have tons of options.”

With the right role models and mentors and goals, kids can accomplish more than they think, she says.

It certainly worked for her: Powell graduated from Washington State University Vancouver earlier this month.

In the fourth grade, Powell became one of 330 students tabbed for the Vancouver area’s I Have a Dream program. It was started in 1995 by community sparkplug Mary Granger to help children in low-income neighborhoods graduate from high school, then complete college or career training. The Vancouver-area program is marking its 20th anniversary this year.

Powell was one of the Project 3 students attending Harney Elementary in 1999. Powell credits the program with helping her make it through college and earn her degree in human development.

“It opened a door to me,” Powell said. “I didn’t think about college. It’s not that I couldn’t, but it wasn’t talked about.”

When college became a goal, that provided momentum of its own.

“You set a goal, and you want to finish it,” she said.

Her path included two community colleges and two universities. She navigated it with the help of “a lot of dedicated, selfless people.”

Among them were 17 sponsors who contributed more than $2.2 million over 20 years to the four Dreamer projects.

The on-time high-school graduation rate of 89 percent is one way to measure the payoff on their investment. And it’s an excellent return. According to Deanna Green, the Dreamers’ college program director, the national average is about 66 percent.

But those percentages aren’t the only yardstick.

“The public thinks it’s an academic program. The work that’s more important isn’t so easily measured,” said Kathi Wiley Gladson, who was a Project 1 mentor and volunteer before she became a Project 4 sponsor.

It’s the relationships

Participants say that the program is more about relationships than academics.

The sponsors “didn’t just write checks. They were at the pizza parties and the field trips,” said Jan Asai. She represents the Rotary Club of Vancouver, which is a Project 4 sponsor.

“I can see Dollie Lynch and Ed Lynch, the grandparents (the Dreamers) didn’t have. They were models for what it would be like to be stable, loving and consistent.”

“It’s like a big family,” said Leslie Durst, among the sponsors for Project 1, Project 2 and Project 4.

Most of the donors have been hands-on sponsors. That’s one reason the organization didn’t follow up with a fifth Dreamer project in Vancouver.

“It takes energy,” Durst said in an earlier story about the program. “If other people came forward, we would undertake that conversation.”

The hands-on involvement was not how things were envisioned 20 years ago. Durst, who became board president when Granger died in 2010, said the initial thought was investing money to fund scholarships. Organizers figured the promise of college assistance would help children stay in school.

They didn’t realize how much money would need to go into activities, enrichment opportunities and programs — including paid staff members — before the students reached high school. As it turned out, just a fraction of the sponsors’ money has gone to tuition. And it’s been “last dollar” aid, providing the last bit of tuition help after students tapped all available scholarship funding and financial aid.

Durst’s reference to “a big family” wasn’t the easiest concept for kids to grasp, said William Kent, a member of the Project 2 class from Hough Elementary.

“At first, it was hard to understand that people who don’t know you can care about you,” Kent said.

Thanks to those relationships, “I have seen lives changed and lives saved and lives redirected,” Gladson said. “I have seen kids — who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks — having a reason to live. And I’m not being dramatic in saying that.”

Two Dreamers in Project 1 wound up addicted to methamphetamine, she said.

“They’re now productive human beings.”

When another student had mental health issues, it meant “going to bat to get a psychiatric bed” for the Dreamer, Gladson said.

Kids without homes

The first Dreamer class from Washington Elementary illustrated some of the challenges. When the surprise announcement was made in a school assembly, it was a cause for family rejoicing — a pattern that was followed with the Dreamer launches in 1997, 1999 and 2001.

Yet eight years later, about 25 of Washington Elementary’s I Have a Dream students had left home; 15 were on their own during their last two years of high school.

For several years, a big part of Green’s job was emergency management for kids and families in crisis: “There used to be ‘fires’ all the time,” Green said.

“Now you hear about celebrations,” Green noted.

The most recent celebration was earlier this month, when the program marked its 20th anniversary. The picnic at Marine Park brought together many of the sponsors, coordinators, mentors, volunteers and Dreamers. Some of those former grade-school kids came to the picnic with children of their own.

One of those toddlers, Elayna Bergeron, illustrates how relationships between mentors and Dreamers blossomed over the years. Elayna is the 20-month-old daughter of Josh Bergeron, a member of the original 1995 Dreamer class.

Gladson, the mentor who became a sponsor, refers to little Elayna as her granddaughter. That’s because of Gladson’s relationship with Josh Bergeron.

“I consider him a member of my family,” she said.

Bergeron feels the same way about Gladson.

“I call her mom,” Bergeron said. “She took a motherly role in my life. She stepped in when everybody else in my life stepped out.”

Bergeron never knew his biological mother, and his dad wasn’t around much. When his father remarried and moved out of the state with his new wife, he told Josh: “You can’t come.”

“I basically built a family with Dreamers,” Bergeron said at the anniversary picnic.

Other Dreamers shared stories of different sorts of transitions and turning points. Veronica Beltran, a Project 2 student, was known as Oscar Beltran as a grade-schooler.

Another Dreamer defined progress as being clean and sober for 3 1/2 years.

WSU Vancouver grad Christina Jensen has been cancer-free for almost 11 years. Jensen, who lost her lower right leg to bone cancer, is a nurse at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center.

In her job, she sees people who are facing the same challenges she did.

“When I tell them I’m an amputee, their faces light up,” Jensen said.

‘I’m a Dreamer’

Not all Dreamers took advantage of their opportunity.

“I had to do everything the hard way,” said Angela Bergs.

“College was not that important,” said the Project 1 Dreamer, who was known as Angie Liles back then.

But she never forgot the message — “The mindset that you stay with it” — and she’s going to college in Arizona, working toward a career in health care.

Not all the participants lived to see the 20th anniversary. Founder Mary Granger, who was inspired by a “60 Minutes” segment on the New York City-based program, is among a dozen or so sponsors and Dreamers who have died.

Family members, including husband Dick Granger, were at the event and Dave Granger spoke on behalf of his parents.

Mary Granger raised five children, he recalled, and “when the youngest one left the nest, it gave her an opportunity to serve a wider community.

“I don’t think she was ready to give up mentoring,” Dave Granger said. “She found another avenue to do that work.”

She found a group of youngsters who were eager to learn what they could achieve. One of Gladson’s favorite stories involves a girl’s campus visit to WSU Vancouver.

“She talked to a class in human development,” Gladson recalled. The girl told the college students about all the opportunities she had to make wrong choices.

But the girl had something that helped her stand firm against peer pressure, Gladson said.

“Her standard reply was, ‘I’m a Dreamer.'”