MAAFA Redemption Project
What began as a Friday night gym program in West Garfield Park is now a residential fellowship that has helped more than 250 young men build their futures.
Who they are.
MAAFA Redemption Project invests in emerging adult Black and Brown men through housing, workforce development, education, and wraparound services. What began as a Friday night gym program, deliberately focused on the most dangerous hours of the week for young people, and grew into a nine-month residential fellowship for men ages 18 to 30. More than 250 MAAFA Fellows have now graduated since its inception, and in 2022 MAAFA sponsored a sister-initiative called “Beautiful Seed Foundation”, offering similar supports to young women of color.
Layered into this work and partnership is a focus on the arts, cultural identity, and civic empowerment. That same vision is why MAAFA helped create the Garfield Park Right to Wellness Collaborative, the partnership now building the $50 million Sankofa Wellness Village, and why MAAFA is building the MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism (the MAC) as the arts hub, which will house MAAFA and Beautiful Seed Foundation programming as well as The Sankofa School for the Arts.
Why we believe in the leader.
MAAFA is led by Rev. Marshall Hatch, Jr., someone we have been privileged to partner with and learn alongside as he builds up the people and community in West Garfield Park in Chicago. While leadership can sometimes be a solitary effort, what stands out is that Marshall doesn’t operate as a lone visionary; he proactively builds a bench of leaders around him. MAAFA’s alumni support the construction of the MAC, become life coaches, and join the staff at MAAFA. He pairs a deep spiritual grounding with operational rigor and systems-thinking to identify resilient sectors for workforce pipelines, supports economic stability for the community, and keeps a long-term view toward self-determination for the West Side. Marshall holds the courage of his conviction with an action-oriented mind toward justice as he builds the infrastructure to grow and sustain the richness of West Garfield Park.
Why the work got us excited.
Alta Futures was just beginning to invest in boys and men on a national scale, and MAAFA gave us a chance to ask a different question: what does that same effort look like at the neighborhood level? West Garfield Park was a community we were invested in, and MAAFA was a cornerstone of it. MAAFA took cohorts of young men through their GEDs, into jobs, stable housing, and ground them in faith along the way. What excited us most is how MAAFA had the capacity to grow beyond its programming to play a meaningful role in holding together a dozen different threads of the neighborhood’s revitalization, with its fingerprints on initiatives well outside its own four walls. Alta Futures had the opportunity to bet on a leader, bet on an approach, and to bet on breakthrough. By learning alongside a trusted local community organization, we have had the opportunity to witness and observe the impact that hyper-local investment on boys and men could have.
Marshall is a visionary for West Garfield Park and the City, and we’re excited to dream with him as he works in concert with the community to realize that vision.
“Lasting change at the community level requires a commitment to “cathedral thinking.” Carrying the best of our cultural and spiritual traditions forward, we must also cultivate intergenerational spaces that foster community cohesion, strategize socially and politically, and imagine a future that the coming generations deserve.”
— Rev. Marshall Hatch Jr.
