ORLANDO, Fla. -- Twelve people, nearly half of them women, graduated Friday to become Orange County’s first certified “credible messengers,” the latest development in the county’s collaboration with community leaders to address youth violence.
In a ceremony held at the Juvenile Assessment Center in downtown Orlando, one graduate, 17-year-old Naomi Flowers, was hailed as the youngest to be certified through the Credible Messenger Mentoring Movement, or CM3, an organization that trains people from around the country to be mentors for at-risk youth.
“People say young people are the leaders of the future, but they’re the leaders of today,” said Clinton Lacey, CEO of CM3, who has previously implemented credible messenger initiatives in New York City and Washington D.C.
Naomi, an organizer for March For Our Lives in Pine Hills, said she became interested in community advocacy as a fifth-grader after Trayvon Martin was killed “just five minutes from where I lived.”
“With so many issues that permeate our society, I decided that I have to be involved in this more than just experiencing the trauma,” she said. “I have to be involved in it in terms of healing myself, my community, my family and just our larger society as a whole.”
Friday’s graduation ceremony was the product of months of work funded by Orange County with the Credible Messengers of Florida in response to an uptick in community violence that led to the creation of the Citizens Safety Task Force in late 2020. Five additional people, mostly county officials, were recognized by CM3 as “allies” of the initiative.
For Didy Quetant and Montaius Stewart, the certification is a moment that brings their journey in youth mentorship full circle. As children, they participated at the New Image Youth Center in Parramore and now work there as volunteers in an area data shows has among the most youth arrests countywide.
Though already familiar with the work that comes with being credible messengers, the certification makes official their status as community role models, and they are ready to get to work creating a weekend mentoring group in the neighborhood.
“A lot of kids need a positive role model they can come to and be open and free to, and that’s what I’m trying to be with the youth right now,” Quetant said.
Stewart added, “It’s not just with the New Image Youth Center. If anybody else sees us, they can come to us for help and we’ll be there to offer it.”
A report by the Citizens Safety Task Force pointed to the need for credible messengers in the county’s high-crime areas, pointing to positive outcomes of community-led youth intervention in stemming violence.
Earlier this year, Ruben Saldaña, a former gang leader who leads Credible Messengers of Florida, received an $85,000 contract to identify, train and certify people to serve as mentors to troubled youth in Orange County, a first in the Greater Orlando region.
On Friday, Saldaña, who once led the International Posse gang in Miami and Central Florida throughout the 1980s and ‘90s and now trains youth in MMA and dance, was joined by Antonio “King Tone” Fernández, a retired leader of the rival Latin Kings.
Where in their former lives they might have antagonized each other had they crossed, today they are brothers in the battle for the souls of at-risk youth.
“We were rivals in Miami, rivals here, and it wasn’t until I went to prison where I said it was peace,” Saldaña said. “... So here we are, former rivals doing this work for kids. If that doesn’t speak volumes, what else can we say?”
A former leader of the New York City chapter of the Latin Kings in the 1990s, Fernández now works with youth and their families to reimagine the way institutions address crime and violence in disadvantaged communities, predominantly Black and brown.
The turnaround in his life, he said, came during a 13-year stint in federal prison after being convicted in 1999 for conspiring to sell narcotics.
“When you see a man go from his head down to a look of hope and then you see him smile, that’s priceless,” said Fernández, who now runs Grow Up Grow Out. “I made men cry, I made men beg — none of it brought me the feeling like when I save a man. ... Now I’d really rather die than make another mother cry.”
Katherine Philp, advisor to the Credible Messengers of Florida and a UCF researcher looking into what motivates youth to join gangs, said the early findings of interviews with former affiliates suggest their participation in violent crime is joined by “this sense of internal conflict.”
“To some extent, they became that other person because they felt that was what was required of them, but the whole time they were saying, ‘That’s not who I was. I never wanted to hurt anybody,’” Philp said. “We have a lot to still dig into, but I think this really helps us start to understand how we become not just better mentors and advocates, but how we can develop programs and really speak to the conflict our youth are going through.”
In the meantime, Saldaña said he’s working with the Black N Brown Club, a Massachusetts-based organization led by pilot Adeniyi Ijanusi, to train Orlando youth to become commercial pilots. The program has already begun with kids learning to use drones through an FAA-approved curriculum.
The goal, Ijanusi said, is to inspire youth of color by providing them with the education and training to one day take part in a financially-secure field typically dominated by white people.
“Believe it or not, aviation companies have a diversity plan,” Ijanusi said. “They always pimp us for whatever we do, but this time we’ll take control of that for ourselves. That’s the goal moving forward.”
As for the county’s work with Credible Messengers of Florida, officials will seek to contract with those certified through Saldaña’s organization to address disadvantaged youth.
“We can’t let it die now‚” said Tracy Salem, interim deputy director of the county’s Community and Family Services Department. “... The next step is now we hire the credible messengers for [Saldaña] to actually work with and start executing the plan, and that’s what we’re in the processing of doing.”
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