This is Q3: Fathering Kids and Communities

Bernard Franklin is Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s guest this week on 4-Quarter Lives. He is a great example of how programmes such as Harvard’s Advance Leadership Initiative give the opportunity to review where we are in life, reconsider how our skills and experience can best be used, and recharge batteries after an intense and at times bruising career and life.

Fatherlessness & Its Impacts

Bernard grew up poor and African American in Alabama. His community’s struggles with stable fatherhood – as well as his own - led him from the Carter White House to the National Center for Fathering and then on to senior roles for student support in higher education. Then life threw him one of those curveballs which made fatherhood a very personal pillar of his Third Quarter, when the death of his wife made him a single parent. He came to Harvard frustrated with higher education’s continuing failure to be the great equalizer in society, particularly for young men of colour.

Finding Renewed Purpose

Bernard and Avivah’s conversation was recorded in May this year, when Bernard was still searching for his route forward. Since then an intense ALI module on society’s mental health challenges, and other research and conversations, led him to focus on alienation in the young black community as an issue of mental wellbeing. He has now become MD of the Boston-based non-profit Uncornered, which uses innovative ways to help young men engaged in gang-related street violence to find ways out. The programme puts a particular focus on their mental health and other support needs, and on the role of core influencers to support individuals on their journey from incarceration to contributing citizens, from disengaged to engaged, from surviving on the street to thriving in the community. Bernard’s challenge: to take a model proven in one city and scale it elsewhere.

Some useful Links:

* Bernard’s website & blogs: https://www.bfranklinphd.org

* National Center for Fathering: https://fathers.com

* Uncornered: https://uncornered.org

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