When people ask me how I built Inside Success—how we’ve achieved such significant yearly turnover and kept the youth consistently engaged, returning, and structured—I always tell them the same thing: it all started with identifying a problem.
Before you start, you have to understand your own “why” and your personal goals as an individual. My goal was simple: I wanted to build a community. I saw a crisis in our area where young people were being overlooked, unemployed, and manipulated into lives they didn’t want. They were being groomed into county lines, credit card fraud, and shoplifting.
But perhaps the most terrifying part was the “pandemic” of knife crime. It was a national fear that gripped our community; everyone was afraid, and the youth were caught in a cycle of violence. I saw this pain and thought, “I need to create a situation that inspires them to choose a different path.”
To solve this, I focused on three key pillars:
- Inspiration and Belonging: We used our front covers to spark hope, but we realized that the real secret is the human need for self-belonging. People want to belong to something positive.
