Our Vision and Mission
The vision of Hunter-N-Associates, LLC is to reach people where they are and propel them toward a call to action.
Our mission is to use research-based best practices to help under-resourced communities and families recognize, identify, and fulfill their purpose of becoming lifelong critical thinkers, problem solvers, and empathetic communicators. Our goal is to motivate and train professional service providers so that we may affect change for generations to come.
How H-N-A Started
In 2002, I became a School Resource Officer (SRO) at a middle school in Baltimore County, Maryland. Through trials, errors, and experiences, I realized that my ideology of law enforcement as I knew it in patrol was in direct conflict with my work ethic as an SRO. As a result, I used a boatload of sick days and suffered from a great number of migraine headaches. I had become a poster boy for The School to Prison Pipeline Publication.
I was arresting and charging student offenders who committed infractions of the law, but that did not deter nor decrease the amount of recidivism inside the schoolhouse or outside the community. In other words, enforcement did not change behavior.
Why didn’t enforcement change behavior? I noticed that most student offenders were primarily minorities, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, those with mental health needs, and those with learning disabilities. Why? What was the connection between these groups of kids and crime?
First, I had to understand that parents did not intend to send their children to school every day with the expectation of getting an education only for them to come home with a criminal record. Second, I had to replace my mental mindset of “saw crime; arrested same” with “prevention, intervention, and support.” Third, I had to replace “reactive enforcement” with “proactive education.”
It took a while, but I soon discovered the power of educating and teaching, creating and sustaining relationships, and mentoring kids. Education changed behavior! My first step towards being proactive was to find a reason to teach every student in the school some curriculum. I taught Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) to 6th graders, Handgun Violence Reduction to 7th graders, and Sexual Child Abuse Prevention to 8th graders. This is where I found my purpose. Shortly thereafter, Hunter-N-Associates was born.