Creating Hope for the Children of Homewood

Walter Lewis knows the purpose of a ZIP Code is to get the mail to the right address. But he also knows the reality — those five digits have become outsized predictors of the kind of life someone is likely to have.

Lewis, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Homewood Children’s Village, has seen?how children who grow up in low-income neighborhoods like Homewood often don’t reach the same educational and economic benchmarks as youth raised in more affluent communities.

“Your ZIP Code should not determine your?life outcome,” said Lewis, who lives in the neighborhood he serves. “We dream of a day where that’s no longer true.”

Until that happens, he and his staff at Homewood Children’s Village are supporting youth and their families through mentoring, tutoring, STEM programming, workforce development, food delivery and other services. The Richard King Mellon Foundation in 2022 gave $800,000 to Homewood Children’s Village for its operations.

“How do you wrap your arms totally around children and families and help youth succeed?” Lewis asked. “That's our mission.”

Instead of imposing their own goals on the young people they work with, Lewis and his?staff ask young people what they want out of their lives.

A few years ago, during one of his group mentoring sessions, he asked teenage boys to?write a manhood statement about what was important to them. One young man, who was struggling in school and often found himself in trouble, wrote: “I want to be a role model for my younger brother.”

Every time that teen acted out, Lewis or one?of his peers would remind him of his statement. It was his own words that motivated him to change his behavior.

The majority of the 1,000 youth the nonprofit serves are referred by staff and teachers from three neighborhood schools – Pittsburgh Lincoln PreK-5, Pittsburgh Faison K-5, and Pittsburgh Westinghouse 6-12. The nonprofit also supports students in other local schools, in addition to its after-school and summer programming.

Other youth come on their own for services such as the summer workforce-development program, which pays teens $9 an hour at jobs matched to their interests.

The pandemic and inflation have exacerbated problems such as food insecurity. So Homewood Children’s Village opened up a food pantry in schools, so that youth can receive good nutrition at school, as well as take items home. The organization also offers home food delivery, to make sure families get the essentials, since some do not have cars.

Lewis is passionate about supporting youth in Homewood because of his own experiences with education.

His life changed one day when he was cutting?classes in high school and one of the administrators called him into her office. Instead of suspending him as he expected, she enrolled Lewis, a high-performing student, into a program with an advanced curriculum. “I was in classes with 12 kids and we got all the attention and support of the teachers. They talked to us with respect,” he said. It was a different world from his old classes with 35 students, where seats and books were limited and teachers often spoke down to students.

He was grateful for the opportunity but also angry there was such a disparity between the two tracks. He didn’t realize it then, but that experience set him on a path to addressing educational inequities.

After graduation, Lewis earned a degree in computer information sciences at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout his academic career, he developed algorithms and computational models; presented at national conferences; and published some of his work. Now, he and his staff are working to connect youth to career pathways and opportunities in a variety of fields.?

“My experiences opened up the world to me,” Lewis said. “I want to give those same kind of life-changing opportunities to as many kids as possible here in our community.”