Appreciative of Blessings, Jack Kent Cooke Scholar Gives Back
By Ed Finkel
Christopher LeFlore received his master’s degrees in public policy and urban planning as a Dow Sustainability Fellow at the University of Michigan. He served as a policy analyst for a City of Detroit council member, interned for two US Congress Members, and he’s worked in the community development and policy studies division of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. LeFlore is now Special Assistant to the President at the Detroit-based Kresge Foundation, where he’s worked for two years.
Not only that, he has co-founded two nonprofits: Bank Black USA, a national organization that leverages research and advocacy to promote financial inclusion and wealth-building; and M-YEARS, an educational enrichment program focused on middle-school students in northeast Detroit that covers social studies, urban planning, and STEM-related topics. And he’s set up the Chris LeFlore Fund at his high school, a private school called Detroit Country Day School, which helps students to cover costs beyond tuition.
LeFlore’s journey toward his educational and professional success, along with his impetus to give back, began early. His devoted mother, Katrina LeFlore, discovered the Center for Talent Development and a partner organization called the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Aimed at high-performing students from lower-income families, starting in the 7th grade, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s programs aim to ensure they develop their talents to the fullest.
Chris LeFlore participated in the foundation’s Young Scholars Program from high school through graduate school and now returns the favor as a member of Cooke’s Alumni Engagement Council. Students in the program are selected nationwide as part of annual cohorts and paired with an educational adviser who works closely with them and their family. The students receive academic advising, financial support and a pathway to fully funded college scholarships.
While he’d qualified for a full scholarship for tuition at the private Detroit Country Day School, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation covered his uniforms, books, athletic equipment, transportation, and travel abroad expenses, LeFlore says. “I had educational advisers who stuck with me and made sure I was succeeding in everything I was trying to do,” he says. “The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation made it seem like no opportunity was out of reach, like I really could achieve everything.”
LeFlore credits his mother with finding information online about CTD and contacting Tammie Stewart, the Center’s manager of community outreach for the foundation, who connected them to the Midwest Talent Search (now CTD Assessment) and its testing initiatives for gifted and talented students, and also guided them to summer courses at Northwestern. After seeing LeFlore’s results on that test, Stewart urged him to apply to Young Scholars. “It changed my life,” he says simply.
“Chris showed talent in elementary school,” Katrina LeFlore says. “I was looking for every opportunity, every contest, and in my search, I came across the Center for Talent Development online. I didn’t know about gifted and talented programming at all. When I contacted them, I got in touch with Tammie, who was a bright light for us.”
Stewart says she automatically sends information about the Cooke opportunity to CTD students reaching their 7th grade year as well as schools, counselors, community organizations, and any families like the LeFlores who reach out to her. Stewart works with close to 400 students annually in the Midwest, 15 of whom received the scholarship this past year; typically, in recent years the annual numbers have been “in the teens,” she says. Nationally, the foundation selects between 50 to 60 students overall.
“[The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation] also gives contacts and grants to organizations working with the population of students they are interested in, which is students who are doing very well academically but have some financial need,” Stewart says. “The wonderful thing about this scholarship and my work is the fact that I get to share opportunities that families had no idea were out there, but that would be extremely beneficial to their students. That’s amazing. It will help them throughout their life.”
Once students receive the scholarship, they are encouraged to apply to summer enrichment programs, Stewart says. LeFlore took an economics course at CTD the summer he turned 15, which he says set him on his journey. “I was like, ‘This explains a lot of things,’ and it opened my mind to new questions,” he says. “CTD gave me the first exposure to my major and put me on my path to my career. I also had a chance to be in Chicago and in Evanston. It was one of the first times I got to be away from home for a long period. I cherish that experience. … Being in the dorm rooms, being with other students, and committing to learning really pushed me.”
Stewart says a key aspect of her role involves ensuring that parents and students don’t find the application process so daunting that they give up. “When parents realize that someone outside of themselves is as much in support of their kid as they are, that helps them complete the application,” she says. “The kids themselves are doing what they need to do; the problem is they don’t have the financial means to go to a university, or to take a summer program that will be beneficial to them. I just want parents to know that there are opportunities out there. I don’t want them to give up on anything.”
There wasn’t much danger of that with Katrina LeFlore, who remembers opening the information from Jack Kent Cooke while attending one of her son’s middle-school football games. “You could hear me scream across the field,” she says, and her excitement continued once the scholarship was awarded. “For them to walk in and say ‘Whatever he needs, just tell us.’ … Did it make a difference? My goodness. There are a lot of students from poorer families who get a chance to go to amazing schools, but it’s hard to go to a college when your family cannot meet those other [non-tuition] commitments.”
As Special Assistant to the President at The Kresge Foundation, which has the mission of expanding opportunities for low-income city-dwellers through grant-making and social investment, LeFlore works with on a Detroit-focused program handling community development grants and executive-level organizational work. He’s drawing not only from his master’s program but also his previous work in city council, as well as from his mother’s past as a block club president and community advocate.
“The whole nine,” he says “She was my greatest teacher. I had a front-row seat to that. After [graduate school], I had the book knowledge. I could talk with the best of them. I had read Adam Smith. But also, I had the real-world knowledge of being in the community.”
That combination of knowledge, and his budding desire to give back, led LeFlore to cofound Bank Black USA with six other people across the country, and to cofound M-YEARS with his mother, delivering after-school STEM education to students who participate in competitions through organizations like the Engineering Society of Detroit.
“The kids that he mentors really connect with him, first of all because he’s young, but also they see that he really cares,” says Katrina LeFlore, who adds that her son’s appreciation of his scholarships led him to establish the fund at Detroit Country Day. “People think, ‘Wow, you get this great scholarship to go to school,’ but they don’t understand the pressures that a student coming from a lesser community will experience. The CTD and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation understood that,” she says.
“All of these initiatives were organic responses to problems facing my community,” Christopher LeFlore says. “We face a scarcity of the resources needed to rebuild our community, and in response, we take action to get those resources. I care deeply about my home, and I want to see it thrive.”
A spectrum of people has ensured LeFlore thrived, from his mother, to extended family who drove him to the suburban middle school he attended while still living in Detroit, to people like Stewart and his Cooke educational adviser. “If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” he says. “The fact that people took their time out, whether family, teachers, educators, people like Tammie who stayed in touch with my mom and told her about that opportunity—it was amazing that all those things aligned themselves, to have such blessings in my life.”
“I’m extremely proud of the fact that he remembers the advantage he had while at Detroit Country Day,” Katrina LeFlore says. “Participation in those programs allowed Chris to have great choices not only for his future, but for others. The fact that [Jack Kent Cooke] invested in him—that whole process of philanthropy is very important to him. I’m most happy about the fact that he looks out for others; he looks for other potential youth to support.”