12/30/2023 0 Comments Battle turf tape![]() He spent a year as a redshirt freshman before flunking out. ![]() He was good enough at football to be recruited by Texas Tech University. He played quarterback and linebacker at Midland High School, and worked summers at his dad’s drill bit company and a local putt-putt golf course. Hicks grew up in Midland, the West Texas oil town where former Presidents George H.W. He lives comfortably - enough to invest in racehorses - but says he’s not “some rich cowboy with a trust fund.” He says he doesn’t see the point in over-indulging, or in waiting until he’s retired to give back. The Hicks family - Chris, his wife, Emily, and their daughters Georgia, 6, and Graham, 3 - attend First United Methodist Church on Broad Street and give regularly to local causes: Bluebonnet Court Appointed Special Advocates, Steady Steps Daycare, church mission trips and community fundraisers.Ĭhris Hicks is modest about his success, and private about his finances. He uses an old flip phone the windshield of his pickup truck is cracked. ![]() Hicks lives with his wife and two daughters in the three-bedroom house he bought when he came to Mason a decade ago. The most excitement comes during Old Yeller Days, when the Mason County Beven Eckert Memorial Library gathers fans of the 1956 novel about a boy and his dog for re-enactments of frontier life, storytelling and a pet parade. Local children go to tennis camps and take portraits among fields of bluebonnets and castilleja - the bright red flowering shoots known as Indian paintbrush. The county hasn’t seen a homicide in 16 years. Mason City, the county seat where Hicks lives, has one blinking traffic light. Eighty-two percent of the voters last fall - Hicks included - cast their ballots for Donald Trump. The principal economic activities are farming and ranching. ![]() There’s little more than four people per square mile. Sixteen hundred miles from West Baltimore, Mason County, Texas - pop. “She is a true change agent for the city,” he says. Munir Bahar, founder of the anti-violence 300 Men March, says Alston-Buck “filled a void in Sandtown-Winchester and proved how quickly things can be implemented.”īaltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis calls the Kids Safe Zone “fantastic and necessary,” and describes Alston-Buck as “a beacon of hope.” The Kids Safe Zone exists because a safe zone was needed for children.” “People who don’t live here don’t understand why we exist. “These kids, when they hear any loud noise, they say, ‘There’s a shooting,'” Alston-Buck says. Many of the children at the center have suffered the sudden, violent loss of someone close - a neighbor, a cousin, a brother, a father. Children as young as 10 years old are recruited to serve in the drug gangs as lookouts or runners - entry-level positions in the gangs that battle for turf in the neighborhood. Nearly 300 more people have been wounded. In the two years since Freddie Gray was arrested a couple of blocks away, there have been more than 120 homicides in the one-mile radius around the Kids Safe Zone. Most of all, Alston-Buck says, they stay out of the war raging around them. On a typical weekday afternoon, 100 or so children aged 5 to 17 play Xbox, watch movies, do homework, eat snacks and dinner, get mentored, practice meditative yoga, go on field trips. Alston-Buck is CEO of Penn North, a nonprofit that helps with addiction recovery and workforce development. Kids Safe Zone is a 5,000-square-foot, one-story brick building attached to the old Frederick Douglass High School, home of the Penn North Community Resource Center. He calls her his “rock star.” She calls him her “angel.” Together, they’re trying to make a difference in the lives of children in West Baltimore. “It’s not those kids’ fault they don’t have a place to go.”Īlong the way, the unlikely partners have developed what Hicks calls a “long-distance pen-pal” relationship. “And if I can give back, I’m going to give back. “We were paying November’s rent in December when we got his check.”Īs Alston-Buck looks for steady grant funding to keep the program going, Hicks says he plans to keep giving as long as he can. “He’s the reason why we have a roof over our head,” Alston-Buck says. Since December, Hicks has sent Kids Safe Zone checks totaling $120,000, making him the center’s largest source of funding in its precarious second year of operation. “This doesn’t happen to us.”īut it keeps happening. “We’ve been literally begging for money,” the 46-year-old activist says. Months later, Alston-Buck still has trouble believing it. The next morning, the first check arrived: $10,000. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close Menu
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