Tucked away in one of Dallas’s oldest and most prestigious neighborhoods, where Mercedes sedans and BMWs are a regular part of the scenery and price tags for homes can top a half-million, an adult Sunday-school class worries about inner-city children.
On Sunday mornings you will find straw baskets being passed up and down the rows of chairs seating 300–400 people in the Elliot Sunday School Class of Highland Park Presbyterian Church. Some of Dallas’s most prominent people live in this posh community and attend this church. Many have money, but when the Sunday-school baskets overflow this Sunday, it is not so much with cash as grocery-store receipts. A local grocery-store chain has pledged to donate a computer system to an inner-city elementary school this Sunday-school class supports if members can raise $200,000 worth of grocery receipts from the chain’s stores.
Much of the credit for this involvement belongs to two members of the class: Bill and Elaine Farrell. They exude a genteel, southern warmth that belies their ability to get things done. And underneath their neatly tailored good looks is a concern for the youngest residents of some of Dallas’s poorest neighborhoods.
Their work with Dallas’s inner-city youth got its start several years ago when Bill, an insurance salesman who is quietly commanding in presence, began volunteer work with the Dallas Housing Authority (which oversees the city’s low-income housing). Brought face to face with needs he and Elaine could not ignore, with children who were being lost to drugs, crime, illiteracy, abuse, and pregnancy, the Farrells decided they had to act.
They Had A Dream
Within four years, they had established the first “I Have a Dream” program to get under way outside of New York City, where a wealthy businessman and philanthropist, Eugene Lang, founded the program, which now couples volunteer “mentors” with inner-city children. Under the program, adults spend time with youth one-on-one to show them how to take control of their futures by studying, making good grades, graduating, and staying out of trouble.
To visit the Farrells’ neighborhood one day, and the site of their ministry to Dallas’s disadvantaged young people the next, is a study in contrasts. Their house sits in one of the city’s upper middle-class subdivisions. The whole area suggests status and prestige. But sitting in their living room, made spacious by vaulted ceilings and the judicious arrangement of elegant, country-style furniture, the visitor picks up no hint of ostentation from the Farrells. As they speak in thoughtful, measured cadences, they tell of a purpose for their life that has little to do with the ornaments of affluence so important to many of their neighbors.
Elaine brings out a fabric-covered scrapbook, trimmed in lace, with a picture of Lang on the front. The scrapbook is filled with letters, news accounts, and citations—including a Mailgram from Ronald Reagan—that document their work and the recognition it has received.
Today the program in Dallas has grown to 17 staff members and over 800 volunteer mentors (by far the largest I Have a Dream program in the country). In a day when busy suburbanites seem wary of long-term commitments, the Farrells have enlisted volunteers who pledge six years of their lives to befriend and guide one or more inner-city kids, beginning in sixth grade through high school.
The program also offers high-school graduates a $2,000 college or vocational-school scholarship. But sponsors agree that the scholarship is only a minor part of the benefits.
“This is not a ‘Santa Claus’ program,” Elaine insists. “We don’t give things, we give our selves.” Volunteer mentors attempt to meet with the children they support, known as “Dreamers,” once or twice a month. Elaine recalls that one of her Dreamers called one day needing a small sum of money. Elaine had the child take the bus to her home and work for it.
“The mentorship is the most important part of the program,” says Elaine. “If they know you’re there, and they know you won’t quit, you may be the only person they can call on,” she says with a note of motherly concern.
The Farrells’ concern has been infectious. The Dallas I Have a Dream Foundation now helps more than 1,800 inner-city children. And since the Elliot Sunday School Class has adopted the I Have a Dream program as the class project, some 150 members of the class have followed the example of the Farrells by working as volunteer mentors.
But there are difficulties. Visiting the low-income housing projects in Dallas, where the majority of the Dreamers live, can be a harrowing experience for someone from the suburbs. Street corners littered with a city’s debris are the hangouts of the chronically unemployed. Rundown brick apartments and homes, hospitable, perhaps, in a bygone day, now house families who have nowhere else to go. Groups of kids cluster outside, almost always looking for something to do. Drugs, alcohol, and violence are constant temptations.
Befriending the young residents of such areas, volunteers find, can be a sometimes thankless, but vital, task. Inner-city children in such neighborhoods, the Farrells believe, are inundated with negatives. “People are negative to the children in school, then their parents are sometimes negative to them when they get home,” Bill says.
The advantages of the program are not lost on the Dreamers. The mother of two children the Farrells sponsored moved her family to another part of Texas one September. “At Christmastime that year,” recalls Elaine, “the phone rang while Bill was watching football, and this voice said, ‘Bill, this is Johnny. We’ve moved back and are going to stay with our grandparents because they don’t think we’re going to make it if we don’t stay in the program.’ ”
Friendship Evangelism?
The Farrells have been criticized by some for not requiring that volunteers have a Christian profession of faith. They admit the I Have a Dream program is not explicitly Christian (founder Eugene Lang is Jewish), and some of the volunteer mentors—who come from a wide variety of corporations or service and social organizations—may have little or no inclination toward Christianity.
But Bill and Elaine counter by suggesting it is better for a child to have a caring non-Christian mentor than no mentor at all. Christians have responded well to the call for volunteers, but there simply have not been enough to meet the needs.
Nevertheless, the Farrells and other volunteers sometimes do speak of their Christian faith with the children they support. “We look at it as friendship evangelism,” says Bill. “It’s a one-on-one situation where you share your life and your faith with a child over a six-year period.” Admitting, with perhaps a hint of embarrassment, that it was difficult for him to evangelize through door-to-door calling and passing out tracts, Bill feels he has discovered an even more comfortable means of evangelism.
The Farrells, who sponsor nine children, have had their Dreamers over to spend the night, go out for a meal, or even go along on an outing. Because so many come from single-parent homes, the scene of a husband and wife still together models wholesome relationships, the Farrells say. They are “evangelizing by example,” and hope to demonstrate what life in Christ can be.
That the I Have a Dream program is working in Dallas is clear. But the Farrells know it is too soon to tell just how effective it will be in revitalizing the city’s depressed neighborhoods.
Preliminary indications are good, however. Walter Durham, president and CEO of the Dallas I Have a Dream Foundation, notes that more than 83 percent of the Dreamers have remained in school during the first three years of the program. Those are the most critical dropout years for teenagers, says Durham, according to official statistics for Texas.
Whatever the large-scale social impact, the Farrells and other volunteers are quietly reaching significant numbers of children in desperate need of positive role models and hope for the future. In so doing, they are supplying two essentials for the life—and future—of some of Dallas’s youngest dreamers.
By Buddy Matthews, instructor at Collin County Community College, Plano, Texas; with Connie Matthews.
