Dawn Barnett of Running Rebels: Mentoring Troubled Youth to Realize Their Potential

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Dawn Barnett

Dawn Barnett

With her husband Victor, Dawn Barnett heads Running Rebels, a community organization that mentors hundreds of troubled youths throughout the Milwaukee area. A mentor can serve as a role model, teacher, counselor, advisor, sponsor, advocate, and ally to a less experienced person. It is a demanding but rewarding job.

She grew up in Germantown in the 1970s. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was three years old. Her father, Lou Burrell, served on the Germantown school board. Her father was a priest, and both her birth mother and stepmother were nuns. Dawn’s family was one of only a couple minority families in the all-white Germantown schools, but she graduated from the public high school.  

“Being one of the only Black children was beyond difficult,” she told me. “The Germantown School District did not know how to handle my complaints. My family lived in a neighborhood with both kind and unkind families. We were sometimes bullied and harassed, and even had a cross burned on our lawn.” But her father gave her some good advice, “Don’t let their attitude change you. Just smile and wave.” 

What happened when you got out of high school?

I ran out of Germantown, and my parents moved to Milwaukee shortly after I left. I went to Alverno College and intended to study elementary education, but I got pregnant and married early. After a few years, my first husband and I separated. In 1996, when I was 25 and living with my son near this very building on Second Street and Capitol, I saw a young kid dribbling a basketball between his legs. He was dressed in a Running Rebels uniform. I asked my neighbor about Running Rebels, and he told me about Victor Barnett and how Victor was mentoring youth in the community. I guess it sounds odd, but as soon as I heard Victor’s name, I knew I was supposed be married to him and involved with Running Rebels. Then, I met Victor and started being a mentor, and eventually we were married.

Once, Victor asked me if I knew of anyone else who would make a good mentor. I mentioned my ex-husband, Damon. Victor hired him, and Damon has been working at the agency ever since.

Where was Running Rebels located in 1996?

We had no building and no funding. We did our training in the city parks and at Atkinson Library. In 1998, we received our first grant-funded program from Milwaukee County. Our job was to work with young people who were first time juvenile offenders, mostly Black kids from the inner city. Our responsibility was to make sure the boys did their required community service. Milwaukee County was pleased with our work because we were linking these kids with mentors, which was beyond the scope of our assignment. The county paid us to do more, and we began working with serious crime offenders, firearm and burglar offenders, all in their teens, mostly boys. We tried to create trusting relationships with these young people, and our method was working.

Let me run this by you. I’ve spent a fair amount of time covering inner city residents and leaders. One thing I’ve noticed, especially in single mom families, is that most of them live day to day, with little thought of the future or a long-term plan. This can be hard on children because they sometimes lose hope.

That’s right. We have a form called a Self Map where young people answer 10 questions. The questions are about their relationships: Who is important, What do they like about themselves, What do they want to accomplish, Who do they admire, What things give them anxiety or fear, and Who do they want to be. The goal is to get them thinking about themselves. Next, we go right into goal setting. If you or your family has no plan, then you may not know how to set up a goal.

I assume this kind of self-analysis and goal setting gives the youth some kind of hope for the future.

Absolutely. Too often, young people do things and don’t care about the consequences. They don’t see into their future.

I’ve encountered some boys who have been in and out of trouble and who think they might not make it past 19 because they will be killed.

That is exactly right.

Describe the evolution of Running Rebels and what, exactly, is Running Rebels?

My husband, Victor Barnett, was 19 when he started Running Rebels in 1980. He was using basketball as a tool to assist youth with engaging in something positive to deter them from joining gangs recruiting around that time. He started with about 50 youth, and each summer the numbers kept growing. It wasn’t just about helping them succeed on the court, but he made sure they were also behaving at home, in the community and at school. When I came on in 1997, Running Rebels was recently incorporated into 501c3 nonprofit agency whose purpose was mentoring. Later that year, we obtained a small building off of Burleigh & Pierce. I had to learn how to do everything—development, grant writing, accounting, QuickBooks. As we grew, we were able to bring on an accountant, an office manager and program directors. 

We are here in your headquarters, this large old building on Second Street and Capitol. When did you move in here?

We purchased this building in December of 2016 and moved our administrative headquarters into the space in 2017. We leased classrooms and office areas to Nova Tech high school. All those years of doing basketball, and we finally got our own gym, and it’s a big, beautiful gym. Impact100 awarded us a grant, and we added a new gym floor, bleachers and four additional basketball hoops. By 2019, a number of individuals and foundations helped us raise the money to successfully close our capital campaign. We were able to afford the building without any tenants. 

From what I’ve read, currently Running Rebels has two central city locations, and serves more than 1,000 youth, ages 12 to 19. Offerings include a catering service, robotics classes, literacy and job training, lunch programs and your gym for basketball. I believe you even reward college scholarships.

We have a Higher Education and Learning Program where we support young people through their college journey. It includes arts and audio-visual programming, and leadership groups for both males and females. As for catering, we started with our staff and kids cooking together, and then it evolved into us offering catering services for a while. We have a beautiful commercial kitchen where we teach cooking to young people. In our other location, we also have a commercial kitchen where the Gathering of Southeast Wisconsin prepares food for the homeless. The evolution of catering is similar to our successful basketball program. Overall, if we have young people who want to learn something, we will support them.

I get the sense you are not forcing young people into what you think they should do. Instead, you are finding out what interests them.

Correct. At the core of everything we do is mentoring, skill building with those we mentor. We hope we are helping young people to learn a skill set to navigate life. We help them to process events that affect them and teach them to control their reactions. For us, that falls under violence prevention.  

I’ve also read that you have 100 employees. How many work full time, and are most of them mentors?

Eighty of the 100 are full time employees, and mentoring is what they do, regardless of their titles. They might be Youth Advisors who are mentoring in our partner schools, or Advocates working with youth involved in the juvenile justice system. In other words, we are all mentors.

How do you find mentors? Are some of them adults who have gone through your program when they were young?

Many have gone through our programs, and they are mentoring the next generation. Everyone is trained. We call it Guide from the Side. As a mentor, you do not want to tell the young person what he or she should do. Instead, you want them to understand the process and consequences of making choices. We try to be non-judgmental. For example, if a young person tells us four options of what he wants to do, and none of them are realistic, then you ask the youth if you can offer a suggestion. As a mentor, it is important to listen. allow the youth to make a decision and own the consequences. This is especially important in our juvenile justice programming where we use transformative mentoring with youth who are incarcerated at Lincoln Hills, or at the Vel Phillips Justice Center. Our goal is to help them eventually transition back to the community.

The Running Rebels’ mentor program has catered mostly to boys, but for quite a while now, you have offered a program for girls. I believe about half the young people you work with in the seven MPS schools are female. What is the difference between working with a girl vs a boy?  

All young people have walls. The challenge is how a mentor communicates to break down those walls. Everyone is different, boy or girl, but girls don’t seem to respond as well in group interactions. Boys seem to like the team concept as with basketball. Girls respond better in one-on-one interactions, and they open up more. I try to create a safe space between me and the young ladies I mentor. At times, girls can be more volatile. For instance, a girl might explode temperamentally without warning. Very short fuse. It can just be a look, like somebody looking at her the wrong way, that sets her off. We are seeing this as a trend in recent times.  

Do you help your young people get jobs or job training or internships?

We have a summer program that is a paid work experience. We create projects, for instance, gardening, cooking, photography, creating videos, doing supportive work in our summer basketball league. We train them and pay them through the process of their work experience. Unlike the outside world of work, we allow them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Being a mentor takes a lot of patience.

I am reading from your website: “The Running Rebels engages the community, youth, and their families, prevents involvement in gangs, drugs, violence, and the juvenile justice system, intervenes and guides youth by assisting them with making positive choices, and coaches youth through their transition into adulthood.” Do you have a measurable success rate?

With our government funded programs, we have measurable results. For instance, 80% of our young people do not commit more crimes after completing our mentor programs. On a more intangible scale, can young people who have gone through our programs recognize their own triggers? Do they feel more connected to their community? Do they better impact their community? Here is the problem. Generally, it takes up to eight years to see a significant change in a young person. Yet, for years, many funders wanted to see changes in one year. But change is not a microwave effect. I think our funders are now more patient. Change and skill building is a long term process.

What is your annual budget and who are your biggest contributors including from the county and city?

Our budget is about $6 million. Our biggest contributor is Milwaukee County. We also have grants from the city of Milwaukee, the state of Wisconsin, and Milwaukee Public Schools. Those four—county, city, state, and MPS—account for the majority of our budget in the form of work contracts. Part of our responsibility is having our mentors working inside of seven Milwaukee Public Schools, and they help do conflict resolution. We get paid for a lot of the work we do, but not all of it. About 10% of our budget is from foundation grants.