JIFF

As Rick Carr points to the pictures of some of the boys who have come through JIFF, he tells a few of their stories.

The culinary program at JIFF trains young people for jobs in restaurant or hospital kitchens.

“This is Jason. You can’t tell it in the picture but he is blind. Shot in the head. He still has the bullet lodged in his brain.

“And this is Antonio. See the eye patch? He was shot in the eye.”

Each boy has a story. Every one is different but many of the circumstances are frighteningly similar.

Shelby County Juvenile Court each year sees some 22,000 offenders under 18. Many of this community’s young people are already trapped in a destructive cycle of criminal behavior.

JIFF – Juvenile Intervention and Faith-based Follow-up – is breaking that cycle for some 150 young people this year.

Rick Carr is executive director of JIFF. “We take in those who are trapped in that destructive cycle,” he said. “We also target the family because the circumstances around the young person have to change too.

JIFF is a court- and community-referred intervention program designed to give youth from in and around the juvenile justice system the skills, support and direction necessary to live a fulfilling life.

“We believe you have to change the value system first,” Carr said. “Their values are inside out so we have to give them an alternative to what they have been doing and offer them an opportunity to advance in life. We redirect them.”

JIFF was launched in March of 2003 and now occupies what used to be the first YMCA in Memphis specifically for African Americans. “This building was constructed in the 1950s,” said Carr. “B.B. King recorded his first hit in the gym.”

As a nonprofit, JIFF relies on donations and grants. Carr said that last year “we had a gap of time with no funds coming in to help sustain us.

“Then we received a $25,000 grant from the Community Partnership Fund. It was like water to a parched ground.”

Carr said that because nonprofit income ebbs and flows, “we had built a reserve but our building project took twice as long as we had planned and we’d even exhausted our reserves.”

“We couldn’t be more grateful to the Community Foundation,” he said.