Blue skies ahead for teen thanks to mentorship program

When gentle Godwin Boahen landed in Chicago Saturday to start at the University of Illinois on a whopping basketball scholarship, the Toronto teen marked a journey of more than miles.

As a young black male from one of Canada’s most troubled neighbourhoods — Driftwood, the heart of Jane and Finch — the school bus driver’s son is smashing stereotypes with a sledgehammer.

This is an 18-year-old who knows how it feels when a teammate is murdered. He has seen a neighbour with a gunshot wound to the eye. He has heard drive-by shootings from his bed. A stray bullet left a hole by the basement window of his house before his mother moved them three years ago to safer ground.

“I’ve seen a lot of stuff,” he says quietly, on a recent visit back to his old street.

Yet the soft-spoken point guard who is off to study business accounting at a big American university, all expenses paid, says his success comes not just in spite of where he grew up, but from guiding hands he got because of it.

For nine years Godwin has been part of an after-school program of sports, schoolwork and social skills led by black male role models whose advice he says will forever stay in his head.

At a nimble 5-foot-11, he is walking proof of the power of mentors.

The non-profit program based at nearby C.W. Jefferys high school — chosen because it’s on neutral ground between gang territories and welcomes youth from both — “offers an alternative to guns, drugs and gangs,” says founder Devon Jones, a teacher at Brookview Middle School on Driftwood Ave.