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CLINTON TOWNSHIP — Clintondale High School athletes will not only be gearing up for the gridiron this summer but also for life long after the Friday night lights go out.
In collaboration with Neway Works, the Clintondale High School football team will take part in a five-week financial and entrepreneurial “life success program.”
Called Project Transformation, the program will take place before Monday and Wednesday practices starting June 26 until Aug. 2.
The program will focus on teaching the players financial literacy and career readiness, giving students the opportunity to open their own LLC for the duration of the program and possibly beyond.
“We’ll have an opportunity to vote on what type of business we’re going to launch and then we’re going to start a real LLC with the kids,” said Shane Gianino, founder and executive director of Neway Works. “If it makes money, great, we can keep it going. If not, no big deal, we’ll get it closed.”
Along with giving the students hands-on experience with businesses and finances, Gianino’s goal with the program is to break negative mentalities he believes keeps people in underprivileged positions.
“We’re talking about breaking the generational poverty mindset, changing this fixed mindset into a growth mindset,” Gianino said. “A lot of these kids, because of the environments they come from or their backgrounds, they don’t think they can create a business (or) it’s impossible to be an entrepreneur or creator.”
Founding Neway Works during the pandemic, Gianino’s experiences as a student in Mount Clemens informed his decision to make the educational nonprofit. He was diagnosed with cancer but was still allowed to play with the team, at least up until his grades dropped below the minimum GPA threshold.
“That was very painful to me because my passion and purpose at the time was using basketball as a platform to be the first generation to go to college,” Gianino said. “So that explains why when … Tommy Barnes of TCB Youth Mentoring came to me and said, ‘Hey, these kids are ineligible to play sports,’ that immediately got my attention.”
Gianino says one of the first groups Neway Works partnered with was Mount Clemens Community Schools. Since then, the organization has been working to expand its programs across Macomb County, into Pontiac and even receiving inquiries from schools in Detroit. This increase in size led Gianino to Clintondale Community Schools Board of Education member Jared Maynard and into talks with Bob Walmsley, Clintondale’s athletic director.
“We started talking about different things Neway Works could help our students (with),” Walmsley said. “We went to lunch. We started just spit balling a little bit on some of the things we think our kids need and some ideas that I took back to some of our leaders amongst our student body. They were gung-ho about the opportunity to learn some things that frankly a lot of our kids are interested in.”
Consulting with students was a key step in getting the program into the summer sports schedule. Student involvement is a critical component of working in a small district like Clintondale.
“We want to do what the kids are interested in, and we have to be a little different from other schools because we are smaller,” Walmsley said. “We cannot necessarily offer as many things, but we’re definitely listening.”
Student support has reportedly been so great that the program may be offered to Clintondale cheerleaders.
As of now, Project Transformation is set to last through its scheduled five weeks, though both Walmsley and Gianino mentioned Neway Works could help contribute to the district’s career technical education programs if Project Transformation is deemed a success.
