Today we’d like to introduce you to Mason West.
Mason, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I began my career as a social studies teacher. After eight years of teaching, I became the executive director of a U.S. Department of Justice initiative, called Weed and Seed, in Huntsville, Alabama. The goal of the program was to work with neighborhoods and law enforcement to eradicate crime from a specific community and then work with social services programs to help the community overcome the trauma caused by criminal activity.
One of the programs I created was a math program for fifth graders. I convinced a college in Huntsville, Calhoun Community College, to give full scholarships to those who completed my program. To my surprise, they committed to my request. I will never forget at the awards ceremony, at the culmination of the program, the children were given awards, which included the scholarships, I was cleaning up and found that the students had taken all of their prizes home but many had left the certificates that represented their scholarships. I realized later after contacting them that the certificates and the prospect of college carried no real value for them because they and their parents did not think they would make it to college or even make it out of their neighborhood.
I realized the power of social and economic marginalization and decided that I would reenter the field of education but with an entirely new approach. I created an emerging leaders curriculum that prepared youth to influence their peers, their government, and their economy as positive and prolific agents of social change. This was accomplished by teaching my students how to apply what they learned in the classroom to the solution of problems in their community. I took the program wherever I went.
I have worked in public and private schools. I have taught at the elementary through college levels. I have engaged students whose families lived in poverty and I have engaged students whose families were wealthy. I have created alternative sentencing programs for the Atlanta Municipal Court and Wolverhampton, England’s Midtown Police Department. I have created gang intervention programs for the Department of Justice and counter-terrorism programs for the State Department and the British Counterterrorism Agency. In all of these places, I have implemented this program, which is called Nation Builders.
I now reside in Atlanta, where I work in the Mechanicsville area. I partner with private, public, and nonprofit sector organizations to bring as many resources to one area as possible. My goal is to ensure that the youth I impact are authors of their own narrative and masters of their own destiny. I want the youth I engage to be confident that they can play as much of a role as anyone impacting their government, their economy, and their community.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has not been a smooth road. Change is never easy. Many of the problems I encounter as I engage communities in different areas of the world are systemic. These types of problems are difficult to solve because they involve individuals, organizations, and institutions. Changing one element of a system impacts all of the elements and those that support a society’s civic and economic processes are usually controlled by people who do not want them altered. I realized that marginalization of certain groups because of their ethnicity, sex, religion, or nationality is a tool used by societies to control resources.
I have been asked to limit the scope of programs, reduce the number of youth in programs, or stop them because the shift they were causing in narrative and behavior was too much too fast. These programs did not fail but they began to change the system. I have witnessed this in education, criminal justice, and community development. Learning to adjust to this has been my greatest struggle.
Nation Builders Conference – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Nation Builders Conference, Inc. is a charitable organization, which is recognized by the IRS under its 501c3 designation. The mission of the organization is to prepare emerging leaders, ages 10 to 21, to influence their peers, their government, and their economy as agents of positive and prolific social change. This is accomplished through three signature programs: Scholars Program for ages 10-13, Innovation Nation Program for ages 14 to 18, and Agents of Change for ages 16 to 22.
In each of these programs, participants learn to identify their talents and determine what marketable skills they can develop from those talents. They are then given the opportunity to use those skills in their communities. The Scholars Program is usually based in a specific school. Innovation Nation challenges students to work with private, public, and nonprofit sector organizations to apply emerging technology to the development of a product or service that can benefit their community. Agents of Change challenges participants to work with community leaders at the local through global levels and with youth their age in another country to solve a problem that impacts both groups.
I am proud that this program has seen success here in the United States, Bermuda, Belgium, and England. We will now be starting an element of it in Egypt and Jamaica. What I believe sets us apart is our ability to connect our participants to organizations and leaders in the civic, business, and charitable communities simultaneously as they engage in one project. Our goal is to become the premiere emerging leaders program for the demographic we serve.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
In 2011, I was operating the Innovation Nation program, formerly called Talented Tenth, at Howard High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The 20 students in the program were challenged to transform an element of their community in a way that would shift the economy within ten years. The students were then required to present their plan to every level of government, which included the school board, city government, county government, state government, and federal government. The students decided to create an education plan for their school because they believed they were not adequately being prepared for the labor force and for entrepreneurship.
The students created a comprehensive educational program for their school that included an expeditionary approach to learning, a vocational training program that included a partnership with Volvo, and a college preparatory system. The students did a great job presenting this plan at every level of government. My proudest moment was their visit to the United States Department of Education in Washington D.C. They were given the opportunity to present their program to the Secretary of Education’s chief of staff, Joan Weiss.
The meeting was very formal. Joan Weis thought their presentation was exceptional. My moment came when the students informed Ms. Weiss that their school had received Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration and that funding had helped improve their school and get them to D. C. for this presentation. Ms. Weiss dropped all formality and lit up immediately. She informed the students that she designed the Race to the Top initiative. They all began to embrace and high-five each other forgetting that this was a formal meeting. It was a transformative moment for a policymaker to see the impact of her policy and the beneficiaries of that policy to meet the person who helped transform their lives.
Pricing:
- We are looking for donations to run our programs. Our goals for each of our programs are in the following:
- Nation Builders Scholars Program – $20,000 for 2019
- Nation Builders Innovation Nation – $25,000 for 2019
- Nation Builders Agents of Change – $25,000 for 2019
Contact Info:
- Address: 75 Marietta Street Suite 501
Atlanta, GA 30303 - Website: www.nationbuildersconference.com or www.nationbuilderslead.com
- Phone: 205-617-1737
- Email: mwest@nationbuilderslead.com
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