The Village Giving Circle awarded $15,000 to Mercy Street Dallas, a nonprofit that prepares young people in Dallas to enter the next generation workforce with a three-pronged development program.
“We mentor one-on-one,” said Carlton Oby, executive director of Mercy Street Dallas. “We do sports as an outreach to the community and we also do leadership development.”
Mercy Street Dallas was among the 20 nonprofits this year that received a grant from the Village Giving Circle, a philanthropic organization dedicated to funding black nonprofit organizations in North Texas.
“A lot of our nonprofits are based in Dallas,” said Lisa Montgomery, co-chair of the Village Giving Circle. “We’ve had a couple in the Collin County area and this year we finally got one in Tarrant County. We’ve been really pushing for that the last couple of years because we do want to expand into some of the other areas of North Texas.”
Mercy Street Dallas plans to use the funding for its mentoring program.
“We spend about $400,000 on mentoring,” Oby told The Dallas Express. “The money will go towards that $400,000 total. There are event costs, and we do one event per month. There are safety costs. Every mentor in our program goes through a $20 background check. There are costs for materials to train them. There is a cost for someone to oversee the mentor relationships. Every relationship we have is overseen by someone from our staff, and every staff person has about 50 relationships they oversee.”
Mercy Street Dallas was founded 17 years ago by Trey Hill, who lived in Highland Park before moving to West Dallas.
“He saw there was a deficit of resources and opportunities that needed to be presented for young people who needed some help in that regard,” Oby said in an interview. “So, he worked with his church and the Dallas Housing Authority to get a building location that was next to some elementary schools and began funneling church members to be mentors with the elementary school kids. We’ve continued that same tradition by getting local churches and local businesses involved day-to-day and on a ground-level basis working with young people from this community in that same regard.”
The nonprofit caters to children as young as four and as old as eighteen years of age.
Beyond that, Mercy Street has an alumni association that tracks the students once they graduate.
“One difficulty we have is maintaining an adequate amount of volunteers to serve the children well,” Oby said. “We consistently need people who follow Christ. You don’t have to be a perfect person who has a whole bunch of free time to give back to the community. The ideal volunteer for us is just someone who loves kids, who’s willing to learn, and we can teach you a whole lot of other stuff.”
Mercy Street has expanded into the South Dallas and Vickery Meadow area.
“We have about 1600 kids that are being mentored through our sports program,” Oby added. “We do baseball, soccer, flag football and we’re introducing lacrosse to the inner-city community and basketball. We’re are expanding our programs this January. Through the one-on-one mentoring and group mentoring program, we have about 200 kids that have been mentored, and then in our workforce readiness program, we have business leaders like The Omni that participate with us. We have about a hundred kids in that program.”
