Through immersive learning, real-world work experience, and a network of supportive professional mentors, ManifestWorks connects those impacted by foster care, homelessness and incarceration with job opportunities and provides ongoing life and professional skills to support long-term success.
Chip Warren — ManifestWorks co-founder, board member and long-time volunteer — remembers how the pain of witnessing injustice first-hand catalyzed/ignited/cultivated his commitment to its alleviation. As we celebrate a decade of ManifestWorks, our co-founder shares his story.
“I first encountered the community ManifestWorks serves when I was 17 years old, during a three-day confinement in a juvenile detention center in Reno, Nevada. Twenty-two years later, I would step into a very similar facility, this time as a documentary news journalist working for a cable news outlet.
Immediately, echoes of my earlier experience came ringing back: the dusky smell of the corridor, the muted colors, the little rack where the detention officers kept the toothbrushes, handing them out at appointed times of the day. I had been where these kids were. I sat in those same heavy plastic chairs while the Alphas played cards on the other side of the dayroom, just hoping to be invisible.
I was engrossed, but what held my attention wasn’t what the experience did to my mind, but what it did to my heart. I wasn’t prepared to meet such gentle, wise and deeply bruised souls. People who never knew the kind of opportunity that I had enjoyed from an early age, throughout my education and into my working life. It didn’t seem right, and the experience was the far opposite of what one would expect going into a juvie serving one of the roughest cities in the country.
Over the next several years, my concern for the communities that ManifestWorks serves grew deeper. I took every opportunity to experience more, get to know people who could help broaden my perspective, and to try to be a contributing member of my community.
It started through an engagement with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Austin, Texas, then morphed into advocacy work after I moved to Los Angeles. All the while, I was still working on broadcast documentaries and with independent filmmakers, focusing primarily on issues related to our incarceration epidemic.
For one such project, I was embedded with a family in whose teenage son was being released from Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall. He had to return to his neighborhood for one week, after which he was scheduled to leave for a school in Colorado that served kids from marginalized communities.
Familiar long story short, things didn’t go to plan, and he wound up back in the custody of the Los Angeles Juvenile Probation Department.
Because of my experience working in juvenile facilities, I was fortunate to be granted access to follow his experience at Camp Gonzales in Calabasas, California. He attended classes, participated in a theater program, and engaged in athletics. What stood out, however, was a Saturday class led by a volunteer who I could see right away was passionate about giving these young men a sense of their worth and broadening their horizons.
That was Dan Seaver, and we became friends. It wasn’t long before we realized that we both had the same pain in our hearts and fire in our bellies to do something to improve the chances for men and women struggling to build a new life. Just under a year later, we launched the first cohort of ManifestWorks.
Ten years has passed, and it’s hard to measure a favorite or most powerful moment. Maybe it was the welcome session on day one of that first cohort. It could also be every time I’ve cried at graduation or the whole experience of participating in our coaching program. Maybe it’s right now as I sit here reflecting on the journey.
Whatever moment might take the top place, perhaps more important is the current of love and gratitude ManifestWorks has introduced into my life. I can’t imagine living without it.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it forever: ManifestWorks is what it is because of the greatness of the people we serve. We shine as an organization through each one of them, and I can’t wait to see what the next ten years has in store.”
—Chip Warren, ManifestWorks Co-Founder
