 Well, I became involved with the Better Chance back in 1987, a very good friend of mine that I was going to school with, Victor Alexander, was an alum from the Amherst A Better Chance program and he went to UMass Amherst and he was the one who introduced me to the program and what the program, Mission and Vision, is and was at the time. Yeah, it's a national program that was founded in 1968 and actually we were one of the first houses that started and celebrated in the 50th year. The mission is to take young men, intelligent young men from underfunded and underserved school communities and bring them up to Amherst so they can go to the Amherst High School, which is considered one of the best public high schools in Massachusetts. When I first arrived at the ABC House, I came with my mom and took the Peter Pan bus up so someone picked us up in town, I forgot who and then like everything was going good. We were like talking to people, she's meeting Wendy or anybody else and then when Fred was about to leave, she started crying and I was like, don't cry. Knowing that I won't see my mom for a while, because I love my mom, so it was pretty interesting to see how I would change over time considering I wouldn't be back for almost three months. We just started playing basketball, all the boys in the house, there's a couple of boys who weren't really into athletics and sports so they were just like chill on the side and we just like clicked automatically. So when I came to UMass again as first generation, you know, you're just trying to survive without any type of support systems and there were some support systems at UMass but not as robust as they are today. These young men who are currently at ABC, they're me, they're me at 14 years old. They're trying to figure out what the next phase of their life is. We just have lots of conversation at the dinner table as a way of keeping those young men engaged and the conversation could be about politics, could be about sports, could be what they're learning in school so there's always some type of a give and take going on. It could be that we're just getting on each other's case and having a good time. We usually have dinner all together from like a six to 6 30, 6 45 and we all just talk about our day, have fun at the table, eat food, stuff like that. That was the first day I think I ate at a dinner table with more than five people. And then after we just go study in the study center and I don't know, it just like brings us together closer. Can we just talk about like stuff that isn't really talked about in school? This is definitely the background and the developing hope that I've needed to just keep pushing on, keep doing my work, keep doing academic work, just keep like, keep moving basically, perseverance. It's the same type of development that we've given our kids that we're trying to give to them. The soft skills, the thank yous, the high hello's, you know, the way that you text. I've gotten a lot more in touch with the program and with the community itself and like when I go to events or even go into town, just to walk around, I see at least 10 people that I know. I think it's just cool that you have a nice network here. The Amherst community and the extended Amherst community are the ones that fund the house. It's over 100,000 dollars a year to maintain the house and to give the support to everyone who lives there and all that money comes from the Amherst and the extended community. We have some amazing donors, you know, some long-term donors, some people who are one-time donors, some people who will donate $10 a year but everything counts. Our major fundraiser is the walk-run, which most folks in Amherst know as the ABC Walk and that's the major fundraiser that happens in October. We call it a foliage walk where there's some beautiful leaves on the ground. This is Gary Mann Class of 1980 here at the Fall Foliage Walk Run. It's happening, it's live and we're all going to have a good time. It's amazing to see them graduate. The ones who graduated last year, once they come back, you can see a change in them. You can see that they're utilizing some of the tools, some of the information that they've gotten into in the house and they put it into practice. As far as what the ABC program has done for me in every single conversation with a new institution that I have or at the end of our time with the institution and I have to do this grandiose presentation, a lot of people start with their college experience and I say for me my experience started back in the ABC program when they took a young African American man from the South Bronx in New York City and brought him to Amherst, Massachusetts where I was provided the support I needed, I was provided the skills I needed to learn and I was provided the community that I needed in order to actually be successful because without that this trajectory would never have existed. I never would have gone to Vassar, I never would have gone to get my master. I never want to get a PhD and there's so many things here that are supportive in their programs like the ABC House that are crucial and necessary to ensure the success of so many folks who don't have those experiences growing up and living inside cities. Yes, school systems are sometimes getting greater but with the current political climate and the way that the public school system is just being in my opinion destroyed and being attacked, it is so much more important that the work that folks are doing in places like the ABC House and ABC program nationally that they keep it up, they keep supporting it, that they keep moving it forward.