A Different World
By Keats Alexander & Jean Jeudi
Founders, A Different World Services
From the Lens of Keat’s Alexander
My Rights of Passage Moment
Right around 2010, when I graduated from Virginia State University with my Bachelors in Psychology, I hit a rough spot in my life. While I was there, I had an array of different experiences that helped shape my academic career as well as what I wanted to do with my life, long term. But once I was done, I experienced what I would call a 'rights of passage' moment for me in my life. It’s this time where you’re graduating from school, you’re taking the training wheels off, and you’re experiencing life as an adult without the safety net of school, your professors, and your family. You’re making real-life decisions that are going to impact your future for years to come. So, I got to experience the world in a much different place. I had to make a really tough choice of whether I was going to travel back to New York or whether I was going to stay in Virginia and try to figure things out.
Just to give some context of what was going on during that time, it was right around the financial crisis. By 2008, the economy was trying to recover and we were still trying to recover in terms of jobs. There were no jobs available for most people. Most of my friends ended up going back home to live with their parents until they found something, but I decided to stick it out and figure things out for myself. I sustained myself utilizing various internships, friends from my fraternity to try to find different opportunities just so I could sustain. We [myself and my roommates] were poor and we were living with pretty much no income per se because we couldn’t find any jobs at the time. We were living off of our internship money and driving back and forth to Richmond every day with one vehicle, four people and we figured it out. We ended up realizing that we wanted to do more with ourselves and more with our lives.
A Spark of Purpose
We were working for the Human Rights Department in the city of Richmond, and we were looking at all these different cases of people who were being neglected. Their employers were doing some really unethical things. There were grounds of racism that we saw in some of these cases. There was sexual harassment. There were tons of different things that we saw in these files and cases where employers were taking advantage of their employees.
As things started to get a little bit better, I finally got a job, and I started working in a group home. While I was working in the group home, I started to see these same practices in terms of how employers treat their employees inside of this same group home that I was working with. I saw how they were treating the residents. I worked for a group home that services young boys who had both mental health and developmental disabilities as well. So, that issue sparked something in me. I wanted to do more. I wanted to be the change rather than just complaining about it. I felt that at some point, I would have to take matters into my own hands, in a sense, to go about revamping a system that wasn’t intended to help but rather to store people and to keep bodies so that the rest of society didn’t have to deal with them. I felt that at that it was the wrong approach to treat people, especially children. They are so vulnerable and during those years, they’re eager to learn, and what you give them, is what they will put back out into the world. If you show them hate and that you don’t care, you can only imagine how they are going to treat the rest of society.
Writing the Vision
Back in 2012, [Jean and I] sat down, and we started to put together a plan of action to create a group home; a service that was supposed to help people. It was supposed to be more person-centered so that the clients and residents that we were serving had plans that reflected their strong suits and things that they liked to do and made them happy so that they could live more fulfilling lives. So, for us, it was a no-brainer.
I left that particular group home and moved to another company where I started working in mental health. I continued to sharpen my skills while we waited to get our license for the group home and from there, we decided to open A Different world Home Services. Right around 2020, we started seeing the fruits of our labor in regards to our vision being executed to its max. It’s a huge blessing to see how we’re impacting the various residents that are in our home. The data we collect is evident that their lives are actually better off than where they started. To know that is a testament to our staff’s hard work and the vision that Jean and myself had put forth in the years prior. I’m just eager to see what we have in store next. For me, I’m deeply honored to do this kind of work. It’s a passion project of mine. We just want to make sure that we are helping people.
My Life’s Work
For this kind of work that we do, you have to check your emotions at the door. It calls you to be a very selfless individual and to truly take care of your mental health and your well-being. When it comes to my overall purpose, I think this kind of work is part of me. When you’re dealing with people with developmental needs and mental health needs, this has to be something that you love. This is not for the faint at heart. You have to truly love and care about individuals and have a utilitarian perspective on life in which every life is valued. Once you have that in you, it becomes part of the purpose and who you are as an individual. It’s that level of selflessness that I carry on my shoulders and that I’m very proud of. Sometimes, you even have to pat yourself on the back because you’re not always going to get that from others. In these times, to keep yourself motivated and driven, you have to find those little moments to cherish. When it comes to my purpose, this is my life’s work. I love what I do. I’m truly eager to continue doing this kind of work. Although it’s stressful, it brings me joy knowing that I’m helping others.
My goal is to support individuals with disabilities to reach their highest potential. Everyone deserves the chance to thrive, and soar with the hopes of achieving their version of excellence. By assisting others in need to fulfill their goals and dreams I am doing my part in securing a better future, for those in our community. It is this type of collective work and responsibility that our company was built on. Our motto is “Building People, Building Family”, and I think when we start to get wary and times get hard, those words are what keep us grounded. They keep us focused on what we need to do in terms of how we serve our residents. As long as we keep those words in our hearts and stay true to those words, I think our ventures will be very successful. This is the A Different World way.
From the Lens of Jean Jeudi
From Survival to Adjusting
One of the most traumatic times of my life was when I was eight years old, growing up in Haiti, and it probably plays a role in everything that I am and everything that I do today. Around that time, there was a civil war going on in Haiti, and I remember it as if it happened yesterday.
To survive at the time, my dad had to take serious measures of literally building a hole in the backyard so that we could sleep at night because people were going around and shooting in random houses in hopes of killing anyone. Till this day, I’m very fearful of guns because every night there were always gunshots. I could still feel myself jumping at the sound of a bullet. We would often go to the countryside to try to avoid being hurt. So that meant that I had to miss months of school at times. But, my father did whatever he had to do to keep us safe.
Walking in Ignorance
When we got to America, it was a completely different landscape and completely different culture, but soon enough, I learned to adapt. I learned to find myself through it all because when you come here, you try to assimilate to a different culture and what you see so that you could fit in and not be made fun of. Coming here, I always felt like an outcast, and that’s why I relate to a lot of my clients. People were just different. I was just different. But as I grew older, I must admit that I was always very fearful of the population I now service. I thought that they were weird. I couldn’t even eat, initially, if I saw someone that was classified as having developmental disabilities or if there were physical aspects that were displayed, like autism. It was very ignorant of me.
I began attending Virginia State University in 2006 and while I was here, I majored in political science in undergrad, at first, and along the way, I felt like God kept on revealing himself to me as far as the journey he wanted me to go on. I started encountering people that actually suffered from mental and developmental disabilities. Once again, I still had the same mindset saying, “Oh my God, these people are nasty. How do people even eat around them?” I very much stayed within my own world. It was just my view, my world, and I felt that nothing else would change.
Leaning on Friendship
As I progressed, in my junior year, I made some good friends including Keats. We all clicked and when we graduated, reality started striking. We went through the financial crisis with no jobs, barely holding on to any dollars that we had. I specifically remember having $20 to share between the four of us for a week. As we were going to our internship, we only had one car, no money for gas, $20, and no money for food. How do you make it last one week? And yet, we found ways to make it work and share literally everything we had. If we had a piece of candy, we would break it into parts and share. Life really hit us hard in the face, and I didn’t imagine that it would actually be that hard.
I remember going home to visit my mom in New York, and I said, “You know what? That’s it! I’m moving back to New York.” As I was driving back to Virginia to pack my stuff, I remember getting a call from Wells Fargo, which at the time was Wachovia Bank, who offered me a job after applying and not hearing back for a long time. I took a leap of faith because I had always been an independent person. I felt like if I could make it here under all of these circumstances, I basically would’ve made it anywhere. At the time, I was just a teller and not making much money, but it was more than we had made in almost six months, so I was very grateful for it. Once again, it was like God started putting all of the pieces together again. I moved right near where Keats was living, so we would often meet and often talk, and his interests started aligning with my interests. After about two years at Wachovia, I lost my job. I had some savings left to hold me, but after not working for about nine months, everything depleted.
Running Into What I Ran From
Shortly after not having found a job and running out of money, I applied to this job through a friend as a day support and a case manager. They weren’t paying much money, but it would be something, so I applied and got the job. After years of running from this same population that I was so ignorant about, I was now in charge of 18 individuals who ranged from mild to severe autism. They displayed behaviors that I had always been fearful of, and to be honest, I was overwhelmed and thought about quitting often. During the year that I worked there, the most spectacular thing that really happened is that the love I had for them really grew. I really fell in love with the individuals. I started seeing them as human beings. I didn’t see their diagnosis anymore. I saw them.
At the time that I got that job, I had moved in Keats, and everything started to come together full circle. He was in his world that dealt with mental health, and I in this world working with a population with developmental disabilities. We started building what we now know as A Different World. We started working on the vision of what we thought it could become. Even then, I wasn’t fully sold on opening a group home and serving people like this 24 hours a day. As time grew, I think the one deciding factor for me that changed it all was a client that I had grown very close with. He became like a family member. He was in his early 30s, but he was like a ten-year-old to me because that was his mindset. Here I am, this black guy, and you have this white guy that’s basically like my son. That’s what they would call him. I became really close with the family.
The Shift in My Lens
After I had left the company doing day support and case management, I got a call from his mom saying, “Hey, if you’re in the area, you should really stop by the hospital because he’s not doing too well. We don’t think he’s going to make it past the day.” When I went there, seeing his condition because he was nonverbal, and seeing how he was just reaching out to me to hug me really did something to me. I think that experience changed everything for me. That day when I knew that he was no longer going to be here the next day, I think that’s when I was sold on the idea of really being an advocate for people that can’t really express themselves in a way that we often can understand.
Even as I reflect on my experience, I remember seeing how some of my coworkers were treated. For myself, I remember working 80 hours and still getting paid for part-time work. I wanted to be a difference-maker. That’s when I finally took the information and plan that Keats’ shared more seriously. Now that I knew for a fact that there was a population with a great need, I was all in. Since then, we worked hard at building A Different World. We spent countless days and nights building this company. As we got close to the finish line, we felt there was nothing that made us stand out and we made the decision to revamp and start over. I would say now with the two years that we’ve been in this, it has been a ride. I think that people don’t take into account not only the mental strain that goes into opening up a business but also that goes into opening a mental health facility because you’re engaging your clients each and every day. Part of what is in them is also going in you: their anger, their fear, their depression, their anxiety. You start sharing that same role with them. You often find yourself in those same positions and it's only because of the fact that you’re so devoted and spend so much time with them, you’re going to feed off of each other. That’s why it’s very important that as business owners, that you learn how to step away. There have to be some boundaries.
Fulfillment in Service
I don’t think that there’s anything else I would want to do in terms of my business outside of servicing this client base. To be able to see somebody grow from the time that you get them and see a year later how much they’ve changed and how much progress they’ve made is rewarding. Some people may look at them and say, “Hey, it’s small progress” but something as simple as them being able to express themselves; that in itself to me is worth it all. To see somebody say, “Hey this is the best life that I’ve ever had” are the real reasons why you go into this type of business. When you look at a person’s history and you see the trauma that exists, and yet you’re able to come in and make a real difference to where they, not just people in the community, are able to express the fact that they’re happy with what you’re doing means a lot. It doesn’t mean that the days are going to be easy or perfect, but it's the simple fact that I can serve that truly makes me happy.
Me and Keats’ lives parallel in a lot of ways because we both know loss to a very great degree and our loss has motivated us to do so much more outside of the group home to now provide services not just for people that are dealing with intellectual disabilities but those of us who are going through a difficult time. I’m thankful for all of the bad things that have happened in my life because with all of those bad things, I’ve learned and I’ve grown.