Project CEO

I put these up. I like to have little mantras and affirmations. I say them when I come in in the morning just to get me a little motivated. My favorite one probably would be this one. It says, “Don’t aim for the sky. Aim higher. If you fall, the sky is there to catch you.” This was a, a quote that my supervisor gave me on my first day of working officially a part of the company, so that one really stuck to me

Very long road to get here, and it took a lot of steps. I used to work in a warehouse. Then I worked some part-time as an account executive. And one day during my pitch, uh, somebody stopped me and said, “You’re very good at what you do. Like, you’re very talented, and you have a lot of local opportunities that you can take advantage of.”

So that night I went home, did a ton of research, and then I found an opportunity for their IT Express program. And the next day, I, so excited, I went to the job center and they were closed. So I had to wait another day, went back, and they enrolled me. The process of me learning the foundational way, because I

feel like, uh, more so not just in this country, but in the world, there’s a set system to how you do things. You know, you finish high school, you go to college, get a degree, and I thought that was the way things worked. And after leaving college, uh, for my short extent there, I thought, “Wow, you know, I just… I blew this opportunity and now, you know, I’m never gonna have another chance basically to get that done.”

And when I found out about the American Job Center and Workforce Alliance, and they offered me this opportunity to do social media, I was like, “Oh my goodness.” They, they looked at my experience in college and they accepted it because, uh, experience is experience. The program that we have is called Project CEO.
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We started this program, and what we want to do is just provide youth with, um, opportunities such as employment and training, and we want them provide them with skills, even if it’s through internships, um, on-the-job training. But we just want to prepare them for employment, um, so they can be stable with, um, you know, financial stability.

We want to make sure that they’re the CEOs of their lives. I really do enjoy working with youth because I’m not just a cliche about they’re future, but they really are, and I just wanna help them to get the skills that they need so they can be successful. When I was in high school many years ago, you know, my option was either you, you go to, like, your main focus was go to college, and I think if they would’ve taught us more about workforce development and know that there are training, um, certificate programs that can still provide you with a good living, that would help a lot of youth that’s in high school if they knew more about workforce development and know about other opportunities.

This job wakes me up, and I get up in the morning. Even though the workday may start at 8:00, 8:30, I wake up at 5:00 AM, and I get started on all the different opportunities because with social media, social media never sleeps. Um, you can go on your phone on an application at any time during the day and see some new content, and that’s something that I try to take advantage of So right now I’m making a new graphic for the Project CEO page.

I like to put little quotes and so little stuff like that, little motivational things I like to add part and parcel of our information and events and different things like that

My mom’s my inspiration. I remember being at school and it was my first time being away from home. Uh, I didn’t have many friends and I was very lost. And I remember calling her and just breaking down and asking her for her advice and what I should do. And not only did she give me some sound advice, but she was always there for me at times where I felt like I couldn’t believe in myself and I felt like I wanted to give up. His pathway to becoming who he is today has been a little rocky one for him.

Not as hard as it is for some people, but for him it was difficult because he was going into different jobs. Um, and I say jobs because that’s what they were. Not to knock any of them. He’s worked in retail and he’s worked in warehouses. Um, but what he’s doing now is a career, and it’s the love that I see that he has for it that is so wonderful, and I can see him growing and soaring.

He’s young and he’s gifted. For a young Black man in today’s society, it’s difficult on so many levels. He’s being judged, uh, every day of his life. He’s been judged from the moment that he was born. But that’s why we fight the way that we fight, so that we don’t give up. You know, keep pushing, keep pushing, and keep pushing.

Until you have no breath in your body, you push and you fight with all that you have. Ready? It’s game time. Okay. It’s game time. All right? Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. Ah. Ah.

I have all these different influencers and role models, and I really study them. I study their success, their failures, and stuff like that. But they don’t really have a true, like I told you before, they don’t have a true background to base that off of. They don’t know the struggles I went through, and me- Yeah

you know, not wanting to wake up and go to work every day when I was working at different warehouses, and factories, and stuff like that. You always set up all the different opportunities, like I said, sending me all the different stuff. And throughout this whole process, like you were there to like really guide me in a way that like no one else really could.

Like I said, everything that we’ve been through and how far I’ve come basically from, you know, like I said, working at warehouses, leaving Central, and stuff like that, like it was just… It was easy, a really easy choice to make. I remember the first day working at Project CEO, and I came back and I told you, I was like, “All right.

We gotta come up with some colors.” It was just it… That’s really what it’s all about, you know? Mm-hmm. You just helping me throughout this entire process. Thanks, mom.

I always considered having a degree was something you would have to do to get certain jobs, and at the end of the day, if you have the knowledge and you have the experience, that’s all that really matters. I plan to take what I’m doing here to a completely new level. Being that they didn’t have social media, I get a chance to create and build a foundation, uh, which is something that I feel like is a incredible opportunity for anybody to have.

And since this is me starting my first experience, this is gonna be the platform to the career that I always wanted. I still have dreams to maybe doing social media. I watch, uh, basketball games all the time. I’m like, “Wow, if I coulda made that commercial or if I coulda, you know, been a part of that marketing process,” you know, that, that would just thrill me

This production is part of American Graduate: Getting to Work, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting