A Foundry for the Future

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Features

The story below is from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

Unlock your potential (and your children’s!) with the help of The Foundry.

Run a quick Google search on The Foundry—a Roanoke company dedicated to, as their website phrases it, “unlocking human potential”—and you’ll probably surmise you’ve discovered a workforce development organization. But if those phrases conjure up images of business suits, dry-erase boards and online training modules, the company’s day-to-day work might just surprise you.

In fact, on an average Tuesday afternoon, you might see The Foundry’s staffers huddled up with elementary-schoolers as they build homemade volcanoes at an after-school program … or you might see them listening to Shark-Tank style business pitches from pint-sized entrepreneurs at a summer camp. That’s because the company is built on a simple proposition: that one of the best times to teach critical workforce-readiness tools is when workers are young—maybe even younger than you might think.

“We can push leadership development and soft-skill development down to kindergarteners,” claims founder and CEO Philip Clements. “I get some pushback on that, but the research shows that the earlier you introduce it, the more time that it has to develop.”

Clements is a high-energy, passionate advocate who’s been known to stand on a few desks in his presentations. Ask him to explain the power of teaching entrepreneurship at the primary-school level, and it might be hard to get him to stop:

“One of the challenges that we have in the school system—one of the reasons students don’t like going to school—is they can’t connect the dots between school and the outcomes they want in life,” says Clements, who launched The Foundry in 2019. “Teaching them growth- versus fixed-mindset, entrepreneurial mindset, does connect the dots… Classroom engagement goes up; absenteeism goes down; the quality of work goes up.”

And if Clements sounds zealous about his premise, he has good reason. Because once upon a time, he was a student with a difficult trajectory of his own.

“My mom was almost a completely dysfunctional alcoholic, and my dad was absent,” Clements recalls of his Roanoke childhood. “She lived a very troubled life, and because of that, we lived a very troubled life … We were homeless quite often.”

Clements can remember bouncing from the Presbyterian Community Center to RAM House, finding safe space playing basketball at the Salvation Army, and sometimes stealing food so his younger brother could eat. “I’m a survivor,” he says.

He’s quick to admit that life didn’t set him up for success – but two important things happened to change that.

First, he met a Sunday school teacher who saw what was happening and decided to help.

“We just connected,” Clements remembers. “He and his wife ended up spending time with us, taking us to get food, taking us to church.” In fact, when Clements’ mother passed away from cancer that had remained largely untreated, the couple adopted Clements and his siblings.

The second turning point came when Clements joined the military.

“It was the best thing that happened to me, because I got to grow up and be challenged with leadership,” Clements says. “There were clear ways to succeed, so I latched onto those, and I succeeded.”

Those two pivotal elements – the encouragement of caring adults, as well as structured, focused leadership training – would eventually evolve into the dual linchpins of Clements’ work at The Foundry. But it wasn’t until he was living in Charleston with a comfortable career behind him, a wife and children of his own that Clements had the space to dream about how he might leverage his experiences to help other kids facing challenges.

“My wife and I just said, hey … what if we went back to Roanoke and spent the rest of our lives just loving young people?” he remembers. “The same way someone gave me an opportunity, what if we gave someone else a chance?”

It took several years, a trip back to school for a teaching license, a master’s in management and a few detours along the way … but eventually, Clements built The Foundry to do just that.

On a Wednesday afternoon, students at an after-school program at the Preston Park Rec Center are tied into bright-orange aprons and directed to tables covered in paint and paper for an art activity. Meanwhile, down the hall, girls enrolled in a mentoring program share handmade inspiration boards in front of the class, their notebooks pasted collage-style with magazine clippings. When each girl rises to present her work, a teacher films her efforts on an iPhone, murmuring encouragement whenever a student gets stuck or feels shy.

At the close of each presentation, the class cheers.

If these activities seem simple, that simplicity belies a complex system of soft skills that The Foundry aims to instill in every student enrolled in one of its programs.

“We have a chance to fundamentally change the after-school space,” explains Rolando Holmes, the company’s director of programs, who says he grew up in an under-resourced background himself but thrived in Roanoke’s parachurch and out-of-school programs. “We know what we’re doing is not what happens at every after-school program,” he says of The Foundry’s work in Preston Park, Eureka Park and Grandin Court, where the organization currently works in partnership with PLAY Roanoke. “We are trying to take a different approach.”

That means introducing young people to the principles of the growth-vs.-fixed mindset – the idea that students can improve themselves, rather than accepting that their abilities are predetermined – as well as an entrepreneurial mindset, abundance-vs.-scarcity mindset and conflict-resolution skills.

Day to day, Holmes says, that could look as ordinary as teaching the students to tie their shoes. “They’re learning to solve a problem,” he explains. “They’re learning that they can overcome a challenge, and that they can change their language from, ‘I don’t know how to tie my shoes,’ to ‘I don’t know how to tie my shoes yet.’” 

But one of his favorite programs, Holmes says, was a three-week summer-camp module built around principles of entrepreneurship. “[In the first week,] we just allowed students to learn about money and taxes, how money moves through a city,” he explains. “The next week, they got to hear from other entrepreneurs, small business owners throughout the area who got to tell their story, and [attendees] got to ask real questions like … ‘How much money do you make per cake?’”

By the third week, the students were ready to make business proposals of their own, Holmes says. “They got to see something and say, ‘Hey, this person is doing it, so maybe I have a chance to do it, too.”

And if all this sounds like a lot of fun (and it is, says Holmes), that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The Foundry boasts a much lower student-to-teacher ratio than average – 10:1 versus the usual 18, Clements reports – and trains every community advocate intensively in the continuous improvement model, Lean Six Sigma, agile thinking and trauma-informed learning, Clements says. Those investments can be costly, both in terms of time and money … and it can also be heart-wrenching to view some students’ challenges at close range, Holmes says: “We do see things that are hard to stomach.”

Still, says Clements, it’s often those very challenges that drive The Foundry’s staff to keep going.

“I know, because it happened to me, that you can change someone’s life, that you can change their trajectory, that you can unlock their potential,” he says. “And because of that, I just don’t know how I won’t do that for the rest of my life.”

Five Critical Messages for Roanoke's Young People

Since 2019, The Foundry has been teaching the Valley’s smallest citizens the soft skills they need to succeed in their future work … and in everyday life. Here are the five messages that Foundry CEO Philip Clements says young people most need to hear:

1) You are enough.

“In our world, many things are compared – ‘This is the best movie, this is the best hot dog, this is the best actor’ … as if the rest of them weren’t good enough. We’ve created almost a scarcity mindset,” Clements says. “What happens when you have a scarcity mindset is that you make these really destructive decisions, and when you have an abundance mindset, you make these constructive decisions… [So] our argument is that you’re enough. You bring enough to the table, today, to be successful.”

2) Dream big—really big.

“I think this is a complicated one, because it’s hard to dream when you don’t have the information to dream with. And so part of that is exposing students to opportunities that they’ve never seen and never experienced,” says Clements. “But also, [if] they have their head down, focusing on survival, they don’t have the ability to dream about what could be. So we’re trying to create space … where this is the safest that students feel all day, where they can feel their most authentic, and then they can just dream.”

3) Effort. Effort over being right, effort over talent, and effort over every situation.

“Outcomes-wise, when we celebrate the accomplishment over the effort, students tend to develop a fear of not being able to accomplish, and so they won’t take risks,” Clements says. “Because they won’t take risks, they won’t dream big, and because they won’t dream big, they start to believe they’re not enough… And so we’ve got to celebrate effort.”

4) It’s okay to fail.

“We have this saying in America that failure is not an option. [At The Foundry,] we say, true; it’s a requirement. Innovation doesn’t happen, change doesn’t happen, life doesn’t happen without failure… And you have to be okay with it.”

5) You are not alone.

“There are resources all around,” Clement says. “I’m a walking example that you can go from tragedy to something that looks like success …And you’re surrounded by people who want to help.”

The story above is from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!