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(The Center Square) – An outreach program is helping troubled youths envision a better future.

Project FLEX is a Northern Illinois University outreach program for kids between the ages of 14 and 20 who are serving time in a juvenile detention facility. Professors Zach Wahl-Alexander and Jenn Jacobs and their graduate students visit incarcerated young people four days a week for four- to five-hour sessions.

The time commitment is outside of their full-time faculty jobs. But participants believe they are changing the trajectory of young lives and that spurs them on to keep Project FLEX growing.

Wahl-Alexander and Jacobs use a sports activity to engage with the kids. Through sport, they teach the incarcerated youth skills that will help them be successful, once they have served their time.

“It’s kind of like an afterschool program that uses sport and physical activity to talk about life skills,” Wahl-Alexander told The Center Square.

Throughout the game play, topics such as resiliency, communication, overcoming adversity and leadership are addressed.

“So many of the characteristics that help a person in day-to-day life can be taught through an interaction or a moment in sport,” Wahl-Alexander said.

FLEX stands for “fitness, leadership, experience.” The professors and their grad students encourage the kids to envision a better future and take tangible steps to make it happen.

“People don’t realize that these are just kids. They are no different than the typical middle school or high school kid except for the crappy circumstances that they wound up in,” Wahl-Alexander said.

Over several years, the academics and the kids have built bonds and come to count on each other.

“Just seeing them mature and have goals and have things that they want to accomplish, and seeing them actually doing some tangible things to achieve those goals, is so rewarding,” Wahl-Alexander said. “When provided with an opportunity, so many of them are willing to take it.”

Eighty percent of the kids have never set foot on a college campus, Wahl-Alexander said. Project FLEX arranges day trips to college campuses for kids who are interested. The kids sit in on classes and ask questions with the college students.

“A lot of the feedback that we get is ‘we’re no different than the NIU Huskies,’” Wahl-Alexander said. They participate just like the other juniors and seniors in college.

“It really shows them that they have the abilities and the skills and the knowledge to do college,” Wahl-Alexander said.

He and Jacobs are full time professors in NIU’s Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education. Their work with Project FLEX is above and beyond their full-time faculty duties at NIU.

“It takes up a lot of time in a given week,” Wahl-Alexander said.

Project FLEX provides 1,000 hours of contact programming a year, Wahl-Alexander said.

Companies or organizations who want to provide sponsorship or volunteers are encouraged to contact Dr. Zach Wahl-Alexander at NIU or through LinkedIn.

Different situations. Different backgrounds. Different races. Different traumas. Different struggles.

Yet the four young men facing the audience in the Sky Room of the Holmes Student Center do share one reality – and, for many, it’s potentially insurmountable.

Prison.

Two already have left the Illinois Youth Center of St. Charles behind, their sentences complete, their release dates come and gone.

Remaining, though, are the stereotypes and the doubts: “You look at somebody who’s done something and assume, ‘OK, that’s who they are. They can never come back from this. They’re this type of person at the end of the day.’ ”

For the others, incarceration remains their daily existence.

“Being locked up, you miss so much in life. It’s rough,” one says. “You miss holidays. You miss birthdays. You miss people being born. You miss people dying. You miss life, you know.”

Also bonding the four young men – and the reason behind their Feb. 16 panel discussion on the NIU campus – is Project FLEX.

Launched in 2018 by NIU Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education faculty Jenn Jacobs and Zach Wahl-Alexander, the initiative provides exercise and life lessons through sport.

Malcolm Turner, Diasee Scott and St. Anthony Lloyd

Since then, it has grown in size and scope, adding the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice’s facilities in Chicago and Warrenville to its original headquarters in St. Charles, where “alumni” and panelists Diasee Scott and Malcolm Turner first became involved.

Meanwhile, FLEX not only delivers its positive impacts behind the secure walls but now transports some of its participants on one-day field trips to NIU, where they can glimpse possible futures far removed from their mistakes of the past or the “cottages” they currently call home.

What is clear from their stories is that FLEX has played a foundational role in working to overcome their difficult circumstances.

Engaging with the professors and their team of graduate students has given them a “different mindset,” they say. “A better opportunity.” “Something to work toward.”

FLEX is family. FLEX is connection. FLEX is communication. FLEX clears heads and burns away stress. FLEX helps to control anger. FLEX is aspirational. FLEX focuses on the positive. FLEX makes the best of a bad situation.

“Incarceration doesn’t feel normal. You know things aren’t normal,” one current participant says. “When you go to FLEX, and you talk to these people who are normal – going to college and doing things you see on TV – the fact that I can just talk with them and be able to talk about random things, it makes you feel really, really normal.”

Project FLEX graduate assistant Izaiah Webb and Malcolm Turner

He is introspective about why he embraces the program.

“One of the reasons we’re able to get so close to the FLEX people is ’cause they come in and they don’t push theirselves on you. If you want to sit there on the corner and just watch, they’re going to let you sit there on the corner and just watch. They respect that. They hope that you’ll join, but if you don’t, they respect it. They not going to push nothing on you,” he says.

“I feel like a lot of kids incarcerated have trust issues, so, you know, you’re not going to trust them right off the bat. It took me a while,” he adds, “but me seeing that they’re consistent – they’re coming consistently – and they at least say, ‘Oh, hi, how are you doing?’ and the fact that even sometimes they remember my name, that shows me, ‘OK, they’re here,’ and just being there and not pushing theyselves on me eventually attracted me to it.”

Panel discussion audience members listen to the stories of Project FLEX.

“You have to be present to be able to make an impact. You can’t say that you want to do the work and not show up. You can’t show up and not do the work – because, if you’re not, not only do you lose the respect, you lose the work and all the work you may have built up until that point,” Lloyd says.

“If Project FLEX was to stop coming in, and not do the work, and then show up a month or two later, the kids are going to be looking at them like they’re foreign, and they’ll have to rebuild those same relationships,” he adds.

“You have to show these kids – these youth – that you really care, and if you don’t, they’ll see it and they’ll call you out on it, and once you lose that trust, nine times out of 10 it’s hard to get it back.”

But FLEX continually steps up to the plate, Lloyd says, and its basis in sport demonstrates “resiliency, losing, how to bounce back, setting goals for yourself before and after the game.”

“They come in every week. Every week, even through the summer. They come in and they give kids experiences. They’re trying to build every day. They’re not coming in with 20 doughnuts and like, ‘Here. Play basketball. Eat the doughnuts.’ They’re coming in and building these friendships and these partnerships when they take them to NIU and when they take them to play pickleball,” he says.

“Let’s be honest. There ain’t no pickleball courts in the ’hood,” he adds. “But they teaching them something that’s outside of their realm, and giving them that experience so that they can learn from it. I think that’s powerful, especially when we take them off-grounds and get them to see things they may not have done.”

Demonstrating trust is important: One counts the field trip to NIU as his favorite FLEX memory “because it showed us the trust they put in us.”

Another FLEX alum appreciated being treated “like an actual person. They don’t look at you as far as your situation and what you’re going through. They treat you as an individual and respect your privacy. They respect your opinion.”

Caring matters as well.

“It’s real life in there. It’s not every-day aggression. There’s other feelings. You got people who depressed. You got people who down and everything,” one says. “But you also got people who are looking to do better. It’s not like everybody’s just like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I don’t care about life.’ Like, no – we still care, but we want to somebody to show us that they care also.”

More than that, he adds, is genuine concern and commitment.

“Everybody wants to look at the problem, but nobody wants to look deeper into, ‘What is making them do this? Why is this normal for them?’ Nobody cares about that. They look at the problems and are just like, ‘Oh, they’re a problem. But what is making them make them problems? There’s got to be something in them,’ ” he says.

Unfortunately, he adds, for most youth who wind up behind bars, “there’s no resources to tell you different.”

“Growing up, you see murders. You see shootings. You see stuff like that, so that’s your normal. Nobody cares that that’s our normal a lot of the time,” he says. “That’s not normal – I’m starting to realize that now – but, c’mon, that’s the real reality in the ’hood, you know, and nobody don’t really care about that, I feel, and that sucks.”

Questions, too, contribute to the FLEX process: What do you want to do with your life?

Turner knows now, planning to open a landscaping business. Scott wants to own and operate a recording studio to produce his own music and the music of others. He’s also contemplating an NIU degree.

For the others, the future means release.

“Am I gonna run out the gates?” one wonders. “How am I supposed to feel in that moment?”

He is more certain of how he feels now, however, and how he will feel once the facility is in the past and not the present.

“Before I got involved with FLEX and everything, I was like, ‘You know, it is what it is. I’m gonna die in the trenches, and I’m gonna go down. That’s what it is. There’s nothing more to life,’ ” he says.

“And now seeing things, doing things, getting involved in things, talking to normal people – as I call them – made me realize like, man, I could live another life other than what I’ve known my whole life. I could do something different,” he adds. “That’s what it is

Several times a week, a team of NIU graduate students led by professors Zach Wahl-Alexander and Jenn Jacobs bring physical activities to three juvenile justice youth centers in northern Illinois. Wahl-Alexander and Jacobs teach in the school’s Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education and have run the program for the past four years.

The initiative is called Project FLEX. It stands for “fitness, leadership experience.” They play basketball and pickleball, they even offer boxing with the incarcerated youth — but the experiences are really what stand out to them.

One incarcerated Project FLEX participant has been incarcerated for four years. He’s still just 19 years old. With Project FLEX, he’s also been able to visit NIU’s campus a few times.

“It just made me realize that there’s more to the world,” he said. “We sat in Dr. Jacobs’ class and I feel like the four or five of us that were there from the facility raised our hand more than the students.”

He says — like a lot of teenagers who’ve experienced incarceration — he never pictured himself as someone who could go to college. The teen says you don’t feel “normal” that often when you’re in jail. College seems like something people do in movies. But it was eye-opening to walk around campus and see that he could fit in like any other 19-year-old studying in the student center or eating at the dining halls.

His most recent trip to NIU was to talk about his experience in the program along with other incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Project FLEX participants at an event called “Beyond the Ball: Reimagining the Role of Sport in Juvenile Justice.”

Diasee Scott is a 24-year-old musician from the south side of Chicago. He’s also formerly incarcerated and went through Project FLEX.

“Some of us may never have been to college, may never have stepped foot in one. But when you actually go. You get the vibe. You change your mindset and give yourself something to work towards,” said Scott.

NIU has expanded Project FLEX over the past few years. Since 2018, it’s gone from just one graduate student working on the project to a group of 10. Zach Wahl-Alexander says they’re at the youth facilities for four or five hours, sometimes four days a week.

Most programs at the facility are only once a week, so Scott says the amount of time NIU grad students spend with the incarcerated youth really helps build relationships and trust.

“They treat you like an actual person. And they don’t look at you as far as your situation or what you’re going through. They respect your privacy and respect your opinion,” he said.

Another participant is also 19 and has been incarcerated for four years. He’s in his last year. Which means he’ll be getting out soon, maybe looking at colleges. His Project FLEX friends hope he’ll choose to become a Huskie at NIU.

He spent the first year and a half with project FLEX standing off to the side, slowly getting to know people before he started actively participating. He says Project FLEX members like Dr. Jacobs would come talk to him, remember his name every week, show they actually cared.

A lot of the activities at the project are based around communication skills. It’s hard to win team sports without them. And they teach lessons that will help in their everyday lives.

But for Project FLEX alum Malcolm Turner, it was also nice to come and let go of the stress of being in jail, being locked up and away from your friends and your family.

“I looked at it like, man, I’m gonna do this boxing and blow off some steam — and I did. I took that boxing and ran with it. And it helped me become a better person,” said Turner.

Professor Zach Wahl-Alexander says he thinks Project FLEX does make a positive impact on the outcomes of the youth that go through it. He hopes they can expand too. He wants to bring Project FLEX to the two youth centers they’re not in and even replicate it in other states.

A decade ago, 1,200 young people were locked up in youth centers in Illinois. Now, that number is around 100. There’s also a movement in Illinois aiming to get that number to zero in favor of community investment.

For the incarcerated young people like the teen who was inspired by his trips to NIU, Project FLEX helps him, for the first time, feel excited about the possibilities in his future; his education and what he can do with his life after he gets out.

“I’d be thinking about the small things,” he said. “Like am I gonna run out the gates? Am I going to skip? What am I supposed to feel at that moment? Then to see my family and just knowing we don’t have somebody watching this. I’m home. It’s back. We’re back.”

And maybe, with the help of Project FLEX, a way forward.

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CHICAGO (CBS) — Playing with a purpose – that is the motto of an athletic group from Northern Illinois University that hopes to improve recidivism rates for young adults.

The team gears up and heads inside youth prisons multiple times a week. CBS 2’s Lauren Victory took us inside a session that combines sports and psychology.

The goal of dodgeball may be survive. But for the young people who play sports with Project FLEX, conquering is the key objective.

For Project FLEX pickleball matches, overcoming something unfamiliar is often the focus – since it is a new activity for many.

Indeed, the whole time Project FLEX plays the sport of the day, they are trying to internalize a word of power and encouragement.

“Whether it’s like ‘teamwork,’ ‘responsibility,'” one teen said.

The words are motivating mantras for the players. Their faces did not appear on TV for this story, as many are underage – and all are under supervision of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice.

We got rare access to the Chicago facility.

“They don’t want us to go down the same paths that we was going down,” a teen said.

“They” are the coaches from Project FLEX – a program that combines sports and psychology.

Professor Jenn Jacobs from Northern Illinois University co-created Project FLEX about five years ago to work with teens and young adults in custody in connection with serious crimes.

“We’re intentionally helping youth figure out – what are their skills?” Jacobs said. “What competencies do they have, and how can those come out in the sport world?”

Project FLEX assigns its spin on sports during huddles – before and after each game.

“Can you be the spirit of the team where you’re cheering people on?” Jacobs said. “Can you be a facilitator? Can you be a coach?”

It is a way to think about the future while having fun.

“I1: you see everybody running around with a big smile on their faces,” a teen said. “If we could have it every day, I would come every day.”

Project FLEX coaches spent years offering their program for free – but that made it tricky to expand. Now, some expenses are covered by the Department of Juvenile Justice.

It is an investment that has led to a “safer, more positive environment,” the state tells us.

Take it from the players.

“If you understand a person better, it’s probably less likely get into it or have a disagreement,” a teen said.

That understanding, he said, comes from both pouring and playing his heart out during Project FLEX.

NIU professors and grad students bring Project FLEX to three out of five Illinois juvenile justice facilities right now. They believe their concept could be replicated in other areas if correctional centers and local universities partner up.