For guests arriving for the VIP at “a local country club” for Family Compass’ North Star Luncheon, things were a bit confusing on Monday, April 29. Instead of being directed to the north driveway, where valets typically would relieve guests of their wheels, no one was there. Horrors! Whatever were the guests to do? Some wondered if it had been a cost-saving decision to do-it-yourself park? No matter. The early morning’s fog had been dismissed by sunshine and guests ambled on stiletto heels to the club’s Founder’s Room.
But as it turned out, the valets had been stationed at the east entrance and looked a bit forlorn as familiar license plates headed to the do-it-yourself, with drivers and their passengers bypassing the complimentary services.
It was only then, after the event organizers and the valet team compared notes, that the car parkers headed north.
In the meantime, Family Compass CEO Ona Foster, VIP sponsor Mary Bowman Campbell, Event Co-Chairs Neda Bahramnejad and Vanessa Fuquay and Honorary Chair Helen Holman greeted guests like Rosewood Foundation’s Lynn Fisher, 2023 North Star Luncheon Co-Chairs Brooke Bailey and Elizabeth Dacus, Jimmy Heinpel and Tiffany Divis for the first hour.
Right on cue, the man-of-the-hour/best-selling author/keynote speaker Antwone Fisher arrived and chatted with guests and accommodated all for photo opps, including the Richardson Kappa Delta Alumnae.
This group had long been supporters of children in need of help. Why, just two years ago they had been awarded Family Compass’s North Star Award, and now Kappa Delta’s Neva Cochran was being honored with the North Star Award.
While the VIP-ers were being VIP-ed, other guests like Kathleen LaValle, Christie Carter, Candace Winslow, Becca Leonard and Sarah Losinger poured into the club’s lobby right on cue for the celebration.
Unlike other luncheons that prolong their fellowship chatting, NorthStar was lean and got straight to the day’s program.
Thanks to kicking off with a brief video, guests quickly took their places and table talk was silenced.
Immediately Co-Chairs Vanessa and Neda welcomed guests and introduced Honorary Chair Helen Holman. Well-known for her involvement in various aspects of fundraising, Helen extolled the importance of Family compass and acknowledged the leadership of Ona, who followed Helen to the podium to present the North Star Award to Neva.
Then Ona spoke of the importance of listening to the inner voice and doing the right thing, using as an example past Christmas holidays when she and her brother dealt with her stepmother following the death of their father.
In saluting her Family Compass staff, Ona reeled off the fact that in 2023, they managed to keep 717 children out of the child welfare system. With each case costing $831,000, Family Compass was able to “save our community $596M last year.” Regarding her staff, they “served 20% more children and parents in our program that the previous year. They also spent 32% more time with families because, make no mistake, families in our community are in crisis. I didn’t ask them [the staff] to do it. They just did it because it needed to be done. We have more fathers, 23% of our client population are now dads, and so those children get to have fathers in their lives.”
Ona closed with two question for the audience,
- “Who left a legacy for you?”
- “Who are you leaving a legacy for?”
It then was time for a chat between Calvert Collins-Bratton and Antwone, with the following highlights:
- Born in prison to his 17-year-old mother, who was herself a foster child. Since his father had been murdered two months before his birth, Antwone was put in an orphanage. He was placed with a woman named Miss Nellie Strange. Social services felt she was holding him too closely and they were bonding, so they placed him in a foster home where he had two other foster siblings who were sexually abused.
- His foster father was a preacher and they went to church almost three or four days a week. It was this time that his foster brother kept running away to be with his mother. Social services asked her to keep him while he was at school. He was at her apartment about a week before he told the teacher that he was by himself. “And from that, he had his Odyssey.” He ended up in the penitentiary. They still keep in contact because “my foster siblings are the ones that I feel like are my siblings. So when my actual siblings call me, I don’t pick up. I wait to see what the message is.”
- However, when his foster brother “calls, I feel like I know he was an angel. We’re doing a lot together. He was an angel. Like my mother, some people are just not able to make good choices. And no matter how hard you try to show them how to do work, or that it’s best to suffer a little bit to get to a better place, they just don’t want to hear it.”
- Antwone’s foster father — “He had his favorites and I was lucky enough to be favored. So, he wasn’t abusive toward me, but it was my brother. And it hurt my feelings, because I would see that. And that was one thing we didn’t share. And I felt almost guilty.”
- Forgiveness — One day when talking to his wife, he described his foster parents as being industrious despite being older, uneducated, from the rural south. They considered that it was good business strategy to have foster kids. His wife was surprised to hear the good things. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow! you know, maybe I’ve forgiven them… You don’t want to live your life holding on to things…. But my first thought was that he was just from another time. Actually, his grandfather, who raised him, was a slave. So, they didn’t have a lot of experience, again, as a family.”
- Social worker — When his social worker came to the house for visits, he didn’t tell her what had been going on. Why? He didn’t want to be a snitch and “She just never asked [how he felt].” Disappointed, he would go to the playground whenever he saw her car parked in the driveway and “stay an hour or so, whenever she gets paid. I just learned to keep it all to myself.”
- Breakthrough — He went to several therapists as a youngster that helped. “I think I probably would not have gotten to a place where I am, if I hadn’t eventually opened up to talk to people about how I feel.
- Insecurity — Despite things getting a bit better and his ability to manipulate his foster parents, he was always on guard. When he was 12 or 14, he sensed his foster mother was “in a mood.” When he returned from school, she told him that she wanted him “to go back.” She had threatened him before but it wasn’t until he heard her on the phone telling everyone that she was “gonna send me back.” The next morning when he was preparing to go to school, she asked, “Do you have your things? and she gave him back to them [social welfare].
- Number of social workers — From the time he was born until he was 14, he had 13 social workers. After being put back into an orphanage, he aged out and was put into reform school.
- Good people — He had a teacher, Miss Prophet, for the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. He found school to be a respite from his home life. “I’d be the first kid on the playground in the morning waiting for school to open just because of that.”
- On his own — Just a couple of months before turning 18, he was released from the reform school and returned to Cleveland to find a job and be on his own. There were a lot of kids that he had known in the foster program and reform school that were in similar conditions that June. “And all the hustlers, pimps and drugs dealers knew that at a number of foster kids would be on the street. We were just like Oliver Twist. “
- The Navy — Two days before Christmas of that year he was walking down the street and saw a sign reading “Join the Navy and see the world.” It sounded like a good idea. When he went to sign up, the recruiting officer said, “We’ll come back after the holidays because we’re leaving for the holidays.” Antwone said, “If you don’t take me now, I’ll join the Army.” He didn’t really want to join the Army because of the Army’s aptitude test and the fact that he was dyslexic. After they learned of his story, they got him a room at a Holiday Inn, since he hadn’t had a bath or a shower or slept in a bed in two or three months. The next morning before dawn there was a sailor at the door to take him for testing, and that night he was in Great Lakes, Illinois, and boot camp. He kept saying to himself, “I gotta do this for me.” As bad as boot camp was, he kept reminding himself that he had been homeless. He spent the next 11 years in the Navy on six different ships and living in Japan for four years and traveling everywhere.
- Lt. Col. Williams — The anger issues that still haunted him were addressed by the Navy’s Lt. Col. Williams by first making him read a book, so they could discuss it. Antwone told him that he had a difficult time reading. An evaluation resulted in his being diagnosed dyslexic. While most people may be disappointed with such news, Antwone was “so happy.” He was given “The Greatest” about Muhammad Ali and “discovered about reading was that you can actually feel like you’re in the story.”
- The road to recovery — Williams forced Antwone to find his birth parents’ families because Antwone thought he had “come from nowhere, but everybody comes from somewhere. And one day you should find out where it is.” Antwone had created family out of the people he had met. One of those people had been Miss Prophet, whom he had lost touch with after being homeless. Luckily, Antwone’s wife located her. In celebrating and reconnecting with Miss Prophet, some of the social workers, his friends and teachers from his youth, he threw a party in Cleveland. When asked why he was having the party, his answer was “Well, you guys are family.”
- Discovering family — In finding his relatives, he discovered that he had gone to elementary school with his cousin. His father’s brother had lived two streets away. And within “walking distance, there was the house where my father lived and died. I mean, the apartment. I walked passed that apartment everyday on my way to high school.”
- Becoming a screenwriter — Initially he tried his hand at creating a better life for himself, but the only story he had was his own life. While working at a film studio, he was told he should hire a screenwriter, but he took it upon himself to do it. A young producer [Dallas native son Todd Black] offered to read some of his first pages. Three weeks later, the producer contacted him and said he needed to quit his job and learn how to write a screenplay. He would not only pay Antwone, but offered him an office on the 20th Century Fox lot.
- Denzel Washington — Todd sent the finished script to Denzel Washington’s agent. Both Will Smith and Laurence Fishburne were considered to play Antwone. As it turned out, Denzel not only wanted to play Col. Lt. Williams, he wanted to make his directorial debut.
And once again, thanks to a tightly run program, guests were headed back to work and responsibilities before 1 p.m.