The N.A.M.E. Movement
Told by Jermel “Mel” Mitchell
Written by Kat Proudfoot Messerly and Laurie Grobman
Situational awareness is a key life skill Jermel “Mel” Mitchell knows well. Being aware of one’s surroundings is crucial at all times–navigating the parking lot, crossing the street, simply moving through life. But living in a violent community makes the stakes higher, the risk of being caught unaware steeper. Growing up in New York in the 1990’s, Mel learned this lesson repeatedly: “I was taught back when I was younger to watch the shadows.” If another person’s shadow is too close to your own, you don’t have to turn around, but you need to react or change your position.” As a kid he knew which blocks to avoid on his walks to and from school. He knew which neighborhoods to avoid. They had to “read the environment. You pay attention to what’s going on around you. You see how people are moving. You hear arguments. You hear altercations. You know exactly what to do. You picked up the survival skills as you went.”
One place he felt safe was the park in his neighborhood. It was a safe zone for kids, and that was understood by everyone in the community: adults, drug dealers, and law enforcement alike. It was an unwritten rule.
Inside the park, the basketball courts were sacred. Kids from all different neighborhoods would gather and play against each other. Bonds were formed between kids even if there was an age gap. He played on those courts from age 11 to 19. Mel played lots of basketball and loved it. He and a group of other really good players “traveled to all five boroughs of New York, going from park to park, and challenged everybody to a game.” Mel loves basketball. It’s a huge part of his life. But it’s more than a sport: “I go on that court, and I shoot until I have no more left to deal with emotions. I got really good because I had a lot of tragedies in life, and I go to the basketball court and shoot til my arms hurt.”
The “big boys” court in the park “was like an arena. Everybody came out to watch all the big players.” That included Duncan Hines, a drug dealer kingpin who could have played in the NBA. Hines “ran the Bronx, pretty much almost all of it.” In Mel’s neighborhood, nothing happened without going through Hines. He looked out for the kids because he policed the neighborhood. Hines was a “hood legend”–known throughout the neighborhood for his basketball prowess. He taught Mel basketball. But because of his bad choices –going for the glory and power of the streets instead of a career in the NBA at a time when basketball did not have the glamour of today–Hines was “ambushed and shot up.”
That danger off the courts was real. Losing friends to violence was a daily thing. Mel estimates that only 15 or the 20 kids of the 100 or so in the neighborhood he grew up with are still alive today: “my friends were getting killed left and right.” Mel was 12 or 13, barely a teenager, the first time one of his friends was killed. He and his friends got together all the time, going from one neighborhood to the next, looking for parties: “You go pop up and have
a good time and hopefully you didn’t get into anything.” But he and his friends went to a rival area’s party one weekend and an altercation broke out. Somebody fired shots and hit his friend Jeff in the lungs. He died right there. That was Mel’s “rude awakening”: “It made me value life a lot more because I thought it couldn’t happen to me. I thought it didn’t happen to the kids my age, and I was just oblivious to it.”
The violence got worse and worse, and at 19, Mel left his neighborhood for the military. He’d been studying aerospace engineering in high school. New York had neighborhood schools but also specialized schools any student could apply to. Mel got into DeWitt Clinton school and studied aerospace science. Mel was smart. He graduated with a 98 in Science and Social Studies: “I was balanced. I was really good at basketball so that gave me a pass before the guys in the hood, but then I was good in school. I got a pass when I got to know the educational part. The teachers saw that I have potential and were willing to work with me.”
Mel was also in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) for the Air Force in high school and worked his way up from an Airman to a Deputy Corps Commander. Once he graduated, Mel chose the Navy because his uncle advised him he’d see more of the world.
After the military, Mel returned to New York and stayed with his father in Staten Island. Then one of his younger cousins, Sandy Brock, another basketball hood legend, was gunned down after a party while getting into a car. The shooter was aiming for someone else, but the bullet hit Sandy. The violent death of his cousin while home for the weekend from college led Mel back to basketball in his neighborhood. He started traveling state to state with his uncle, playing pickup games while following concerts and selling t-shirts.
Back in New York in 2012 after shoulder surgery, Mel ran into another cousin who’d also been a hood legend. His cousin was about to be a father to a baby girl, and he and Mel had been talking about his cousin changing his life for his new daughter. Mel was going to help him. But then his cousin was killed right where Mel usually parked his truck in New York. First Mel thought about trying to find out who was responsible and why. But he realized, “I got to get away from this stuff. That was the realest moment I had.”
Mel moved in with family in Reading in 2013, including his eight nieces and nephews. Mel’s brother and sister-in-law were too afraid to let their children out of the house due to violence. Mel noticed tension building in the family from the kids having no outlet. They didn’t have friends. The parents, worried about bills, their jobs, and everything else, didn’t understand the conflicts going on in the home, but Mel did. Mel started talking to the kids and taking them to the park nearby and playing basketball. The tension in the home eased.
Mel’s nieces and nephews began inviting their friends to the park. The kids thought he was a coach and asked him to teach them basketball. Mel started working with them. Soon he had a group of 30+ kids from different parts of the city coming to the park each day. Mel started to feel like the kids were looking forward to seeing him. They called him “Coach Mel.” He began to feel like he had to be there every day: “They would be trying to show me what they learned. And they really were getting it. We would play games and people from
other neighborhoods started coming over and hanging out. And it wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about publicity. It was just a pure love.”
One day, Mel had to get an MRI at Hershey Medical Center and wasn’t at the park. And during that day, one of the kids was killed by his mother’s ex-boyfriend who walked into the park and slashed his throat in front of the other kids. It happened right there in front of where Mel’s truck was usually parked. Just like what happened when his cousin was killed in New York. Mel couldn’t believe it happened, and he was hurting. The kids stopped coming to the park.
But then Mel walked around the neighborhood, knocking on doors. He told the parents he’d be in the park and the kids would be safe. The kids came back. They cleaned up the park. And they played basketball.
Soon, kids from around the city came to the park to pay tribute to the boy who had been killed. They played basketball every day against different groups, mixing the teams up and interacting with each other. Mel named the group Willpower Basketball. The guys who’d been selling drugs in the neighborhood made that park “a neutral zone.” There were no drugs there. There was no violence, no fighting there– “And the neighborhood did that.” They saw what Mel was doing: “I got your back, don’t worry. Nothing going on here.” It was mentoring kids, spending time with them, keeping them out of trouble. Mel saw a lack of community, so he started forming one: “Neighbors over neighborhood.” Instead of claiming what area someone lives in, Mel tried to teach the kids the importance of taking pride in their whole community.
While looking for resources to help with Willpower Basketball, Mel was referred to the Olivet Boys and Girls Club for employment. He was hired as the Assistant Director of the Clinton Street Club in 2016, promoted to Director in 2018. Mel saw it as a chance to keep the Willpower Basketball kids together all year long, including in the winter, while also helping other kids who don’t want to play basketball. Mel formed many great relationships with the families, community partners, and kids, creating bonds that remain strong and “will last a lifetime.” His work at Olivet motivated Mel to stay in this field–working with youth to help them make better life decisions given the circumstances of growing up in a low-income environment and the challenges of the drugs and violence it brings.
When Mel left the Clinton Street club, he decided to start a nonprofit, Now All Must Evolve (N.A.M.E.). Reading gives Mel “flashes” of how he grew up: keeping your head on a swivel, paying attention to the people around you, how they’re moving, how they’re talking. Every
detail counts, every detail can make a difference. In Mel’s experience, what helped keep the kids safe was involvement not only from adults, but older kids in the neighborhood. Despite the violence and the drugs, it was a neighborhood. Mel isn’t seeing this happening enough in Reading. The adults aren’t looking out for everyone’s kids, and the kids are “so isolated because either they’re on their computers, on their phones, or in the house. They don’t really interact with each other like that.”
Mel went to a Reading Town Hall meeting and spoke to the Reading School Board about what was going on with youth in the city. Later that week, one of the school board members referred him to Mayor Eddie Moran. When the mayor heard Mel’s vision, he referred Mel to Alvernia University and College Towne. N.A.M.E. received $5000 through The O’Pake Institute’s Financial Lending and Innovation Collaborative to become an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit, followed by tenancy in the SPARK Business Incubator program and worked with an Alvernia student to launch his website. The O’Pake Institute Annual Report July 2022- June 2023 proudly announced that N.A.M.E. went from serving one student to 58 students in three months.
Through N.A.M.E., Mel is continuing and expanding on what he did informally in his own Reading neighborhood and then again through his work at the Olivet Clinton Street club– being there for kids, giving them fun things to do, mentoring them, challenging them, building community, and teaching them the “survival skills” they need to be safe in the city, just as he was taught when he was a kid. The kids respect him. They reach out to him when something’s going on, if someone gets hurt, if something’s about to happen. They text and call him. Mel also uses social media to see what’s going on with the kids and will reach out when something seems off.
Nearly every weekday afternoon during the school year and summer, Coach Mel meets up with many kids at his office on Penn Street. Many are the same kids from years back when he started playing basketball with kids in the park. Many were with him at Olivet. Some are new, hearing about N.A.M.E. from their friends. After playing games that challenge the
kids, like Chess or Battleship, Mel and the kids pick up basketballs, head out to the streets, and dribble the ball as they walk on and around Penn Street. The kids are practicing basketball. But more importantly, they are becoming part of the N.A.M.E. Movement.
As the kids walk and dribble, they meet people. They go into stores, coffee shops, mom and pop stores, and barber shops and get to know the owners and the staff. Breaking down the stereotypes many adults have of Reading kids, the owners and the staff get to know the kids. This builds community for these kids to protect them. If a kid is in the neighborhood and something’s going on, they know the safe places for them with an adult there who will look out for them and keep them safe until the situation calms down or their parents or Coach Mel show up. As he tells the kids, “These are all places that you’re going to have a connection with. Those are things that we used to have when we were younger. We knew all of our neighborhood stores and our neighbors, and our neighbors knew us.”
That’s important because Mel can’t be everywhere. But he “can be represented by a lot of people everywhere they go.” When the kids tell him what’s happening–what they observed, what other kids told them–Mel can address it. He’ll tell the kid, “‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re doing, but apparently, you’re doing something wrong because they’re talking to me about you. So now, let’s figure it out before it gets to something worse.’ I offer myself as the neutral party. I don’t win or lose. All I do is make sure we get peace.” Mel knows the kids’ families too, the parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. It’s about building community.
Mel is building a summer program and looking to expand N.A.M.E.’s activities and number of registered kids during the school year. He’s already begun a monthly financial literacy program for N.A.M.E families. The program will soon move across Penn Street into the SPARK program’s new building, where the kids will have access to a bigger meeting space along with the many resources of the University, such as computer labs.
Mel is also a single dad to two young children, a 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son, who live with him. Other than back and forth to school, day care, and interacting with the kids at N.A.M.E., they are “pretty much sheltered.” As he builds N.A.M.E., Mel is limited in what he can afford. Locally, he takes them to certain parks where he feels they are safe. But he doesn’t “trust” many of the local places because he sees too many parents letting their kids disrespect the rules and ignore common courtesies of playing together: “I’m trying to keep my kids safe and teach them a certain way, and then there’s other kids not being taught that way. So if you’re okay with them doing that stuff, I’m okay with you doing that. But I don’t want my kids to learn it.”
That’s partly why Mel feels so strongly about N.A.M.E.: “The environment my kids are growing up in is going to be more important than my presence.” Mel’s son and daughter spend Friday afternoons with the N.A.M.E. kids and get to know them and the adults they all meet and visit along the way: “Part of what I’m doing is building a better future for them. Because I’m not going to be here forever.” Being part of the N.A.M.E. Movement will help his children by having that wall of safety around them.
N.A.M.E. is Mel’s contribution to the future, his way of making sure that every child and teen in Reading has an adult looking out for them.