Michael Chen has one rule. It's not about grades, or goals, or getting into college. It's not even about showing up on time, though he'd prefer that too.
The rule is this: if you say you'll be somewhere, be there.
"Everything else is negotiable," says Chen, 51, seated in a small conference room at the Future Forward Port Laken offices on Clement Street. "Reliability is not. These kids have often had a lifetime of adults who made promises and didn't keep them. The single most powerful thing I can do is just be consistent. Show up. Again and again."
THE BASKETBALL COURT
In the fall of 2010, Chen was 36, recently promoted to senior engineer at a mid-sized tech firm. He played basketball twice a week at the Clement Street courts and regarded it as exactly that: ritual. Routine. Then a thirteen-year-old named Marcus Williams asked him for a tip on his jump shot.
"He had this energy," Chen remembers. "Hungry. That's the only word for it. Not for basketball, but for something to hold onto." They shot hoops for two hours. Chen gave him his cell number. Marcus called the next day.
"Mr. Chen didn't talk about college like it was some distant dream I might achieve if I worked hard enough," says Marcus Williams, now 28, a mechanical engineer at Orion Aerospace in San Diego. "He talked about it like it was already decided. That shift in expectation changed everything for me."
BUILDING FUTURE FORWARD
After three years of informal mentoring, Chen incorporated Future Forward Port Laken in 2013 with a board of five and a budget of $22,000. The program's structure is deliberately demanding: mentor-mentee pairs commit to a minimum of two years.
"The two-year minimum is what separates us from a lot of programs," Chen says. "Relationships don't become transformative in six months. They become transactional. We're not here for transactions."
THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER
Future Forward now serves 140 active mentoring pairs and has supported over 200 young people since founding. 94% of alumni graduated high school, against a district average of 71% for comparable demographics.
But Chen resists statistics as the primary story. "Numbers tell you something. They don't tell you about the kid who was about to drop out in January and graduated in June because his mentor drove him to school every morning for three weeks during a family crisis."
Perhaps most telling: roughly one in five program alumni has returned as a volunteer mentor. Marcus Williams is one of them.
Future Forward Port Laken is currently recruiting mentors for its spring cohort. No prior experience required, only availability and the willingness to show up. Visit futureforwardportlaken.org.