MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A Memphis gang interventionist and mentor is keeping kids out of trouble by getting them into business.
WREG visited Wednesday with his mentees, who were cashing in on the idea.
“I’m the executive producer. She’s the CEO of the company,” 12th-grader Jamison Rowan said, gesturing to business partner Ariel Stewart.
Those are titles most 12th- and 11th-graders do not have.
“It started with just making a song, and we were like, if we’re going to make music, we want to do it the way people wouldn’t expect us to do it. We wanted to do it professional,” Stewart said.
Along with friends, Stewart and Rowan run the newly formed company Conservative Records.
That name seems especially fitting when you consider the way other kids they know make money.
Stewart and Rowan are home-schooled now, but their mentor, Jeffery Futrell, explained both teens have been exposed to gangs.
“The way I address gang affiliation or association is you have to have a counter-measure in place, if you’re trying to change the culture that our children exist in,” Futrell said. “So, one of things with entrepreneurship, it creates revenues.”
Futrell runs Young Man University, a self-defined “system,” to help at-risk young men in the community. It runs alongside Young Woman University.
He does gang intervention in schools, juvenile court and prisons.
Lately, Futrell has been teaching teens how to make money without joining a gang or committing a crime.
“The streets give incentives to our children. So, we have to have something that gives incentives,” Futrell said. “Nothing better that I’ve found like business.”
Futrell said those incentives stop teens from looking for cash in the wrong places.
“We have to make sure our kids have ‘skin in the game.’ They have to have a part, a belonging, an ownership to it,” he said.
“It [business] helps to motivate,” Stewart said.
Right now, Conservative Records has three artists. In 10 years, Stewart and Rowan hope people will see that label everywhere.
“I can get through school without getting in any trouble,” Rowan said.
Futrell explained that the other students involved in the record label attend a public high school. He said the school’s principal told him those students have improved.
