When Cam Newton made a promise to his mother that he would graduate from college, he didn’t imagine that a question posed to him in class would five years later be the inspiration for a new program for his Cam Newton Foundation.
“It was a sociology class that I went to, that I got a degree in; the first day, the first question was, ‘When was the first time that you could remember that you had an everyday accountance or you were around every day a person of a different race?” Newton said at the kickoff event for the Un1ted As 1 Program, held Tuesday at Camp North End. “As I was listening to the answers, it was mind-boggling. I was blown away, not because of the diversity that people had in their upbringing, but in the segregation.”
Newton’s new program aims to change that.
Fittingly, after the promise her son made led to the inspiration for the program, Newton sat next to his mother Jackie for much of the kickoff event for the Cam Newton Foundation’s newest endeavor; Un1ted As 1 will bring together 60 youths from three Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System middle schools and the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Charlotte to work together, embrace diversity and solve problems.
The Cam Newton Foundation, founded in 2012, hopes that Un1ted As 1, whose pilot program will be held over three days in January, will help these youths to understand the power of influence and wielding that influence to impact social change as well as seeing issues in today’s society as opportunities for positive change.
The Foundation will partner with the Winters Group, a global diversity and inclusion firm that has been specializing in creating transformative and sustainable solutions for organizations in support of their efforts to create more equitable and inclusive environments for over thirty years, for a program to help middle school youths gain exposure to not only more of the world around them, but parts of the world that may not necessarily be a part of their community.
Newton was embarrassed to admit that the first prolonged exposure to someone of a different race was when he attended college, and wants to make sure that parts of the next generation doesn’t have to have the same issue that he faced.
“When he reflected on how he got exposed to different people, different places, different situations, he knew that sports had been the vehicle,” host Sonja Gantt, executive director of the CMS Foundation said about Newton. “He started thinking the fact that it’s important to have that exposure early, to know about people who come from different backgrounds, maybe have different ideas than you do and the vision here is to bring together some of Charlotte’s finest young people to really sit and talk about today’s issues. To work hard, to understand people who come from different backgrounds and how they may view things; but ultimately, this is about [the children] becoming great leaders back at [their] own schools and in [their] communities.”
“There’s things that happened in my life that I’m embarrassed to even talk about, but it’s those things that encourage me to change each and every day.” pic.twitter.com/IslZjqAWAj
— The Riot Report (@RRiotReport) December 13, 2017
“We don’t think the way we think because we just grow up or we’re just born with this thought; somebody implemented in our head to think a certain type of way,” Newton explained about how he aims to help the kids’ thought processes. “How about not changing that thinking, but just giving a different flavor of ‘let’s not do vanilla, let’s not do chocolate, why can’t we do Baskin Robbins?'”
While the program will be starting in Charlotte, Newton envisions the Un1ted As 1 program being nationwide soon enough and he hopes to involve his fellow players as the program grows not just in scale but in influence.
Even though the event had a serious message, it wouldn’t be a Cam Newton event without that signature Cam moment; after the kickoff concluded, Gantt told the kids that they would have to wait until the January weekend for pictures with Newton. The kids deflated, understanding but disappointed.
“Nah, scratch that,” Newton declared. “I’ve got time, let’s take some selfies.”
