Photo: Ken Papaleo Rocky Mountain News
 

Mookie is known officially as Shavan, a fifth-grader at Whittier Elementary School. He lives with his great-grandma, whom he calls “great great,” a name I find fitting given that after her husband died, Ethel Blackwell raised her eight children, a few grandchildren and now four great-grandchildren because she could not bear to see them put up for adoption. “They are my blood,” she says. Mookie spent a couple years in foster care before Mrs. Blackwell stepped up and took them in, and for this Sonny pronounces her the real hero.

It is safe to assume that Mookie’s first years were not particularly stable, and this makes him fairly typical among youths needing mentors. It also explains this little story:

We were at ESPN Zone on the 16th Street Mall because Sonny wanted to treat Mookie to something special. He hadn’t seen much of Mookie lately, not since the Rockies blasted off, firing up a city and making Sonny one very busy man.

I asked Mookie something insensitive like, so, how was it for you with Sonny so busy, and Mookie looked at me and then at Sonny and said: “I was sad. I thought maybe he went to another kid.”

Sonny reared back, surprised, and said to Mookie: No-o-o-o. And Mookie looked at him, serious as can be, and said: “I did.”

This boy’s need, so naked here, is the reason why Sonny is doing what the other 140 Partner mentors are doing, why what Metro Denver Partners is doing is so important. Kids need adults who care. Who will listen. Whom they can trust. It’s as easy and as hard as that. I must have said this a million times, but I will say it again. Too many kids cannot imagine lives outside their neighborhoods, cannot place themselves in the future, in a larger world where they matter. Sometimes a family cannot provide that. Sometimes they don’t know how. Sometimes they don’t even try. But one responsible, caring adult can open a door where one was not even imagined.

Metro Denver Partners has found this to be true during the past 40 years, and perhaps you yourself, reading this story right now, can think back on a person who helped you see possibility.

Sonny can think of people who mentored him. He worked in television for 22 years as a news photographer and later, a manager. Five years ago, he became spokesman for the police department. He says if there is one thing he wants to show Mookie, it is that “he can.” “He can,” Sonny says. “It sounds so simple. But I want him to know he can be anything; there is nothing he can’t accomplish. Sometimes we give people excuses not to make it, like ‘Oh, he’s from a single-parent household.’ Well, I came from a single-parent household, and those are just excuses.”

Metro Denver Partners began in 1968 through a church group, with a former seminarian named Bob Moffitt and a business­man named Bill Mitchell. They and others began meeting with Manual High School students and the pair persuaded former Denver juvenile court Judge Philip Gilliam to refer young people to their group for mentoring. Since then, 15,000 youths have been served through Metro Denver Partners’ programs, the largest of which is mentoring.

Running the organization consumes about 70 percent of its budget, the money paying for staff members who work with mentors from the opening background checks to training, monthly activities and weekly check-ins. Today, 70 children are on the waiting list for mentors.

One last thing: I said that kids need adults. Sometimes adults need kids, too. In his job, Sonny says, he often sees the worst of people. But Mookie has reminded him of the good. “He’s just a sweet kid,” Sonny said. “He’s very humble. He doesn’t have a sense of entitlement. He has an attitude that is just refreshing and reaffirming.”

Oh, and Sonny would like Mookie to know one more thing: “I’m not going to go out of his life. I’ll be there for him. I’m his friend. Not his mom’s. Not his sister’s. I’m his friend.”