Dimitar Jakimovski- Training Our Kids for Life

Hi everyone! This is Dimitar Jakimovski, and I'm serving at Downtown Boxing Gym in Detroit.

I remember when I first learned about the Downtown Boxing Gym, during my phone interview with two AmeriCorps VISTA leaders. I was expressing what I was hoping to accomplish during my service year. I wanted real, hands-on experience with the community of East Detroit, my home community, and more than anything, I wanted my service year to change me fundamentally as a person. I expressed this to Maggie, who told me about the DBG. “Every day will be different,” she told me. And oh boy, was she right. I was introduced to an incredible after school youth program, dedicated to helping the lives of kids on the east side, allowing them to have a space to receive academic tutoring and work on their physical fitness through the sport of boxing.
 
There’s no greater gift than walking into work and being presented a new problem which has popped up concerning one of the kids we serve, and then getting to work to help solve it. The gym’s motto, “We Train Kids for Life,” guides how we go about tackling issues that come up. We are of the opinion that we are there to help provide a structure for the pupil to fix their own problem. We give ideas, provide opportunities, or empathize with our kids, spurring in them a desire to tackle their own issues knowing that we’re right there behind them in case they ever need anything.
 
This role is further demonstrated in my own position at the gym. I am a college and career readiness coach, meaning it’s part of my job to develop and implement a curriculum to be taught in the classroom that gives our kids, most of whom don’t know much about college or careers, an idea of what they want to do in life. It’s not our job to tell our kids what to do, but to present them with the knowledge and options to be able to make that decision for themselves.
 
We preach self-advocacy, that is, the ability to face the world with the keen ability to dictate what you want your future to look like. We pull back the curtains, giving a glimpse of what life after high school might look like. Earlier in my service year, I took our kids on our first college tour of the year to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, my alma mater. It was strange to be arriving on a bus with kids from the east side to a place that I had lived a much different life, and showing them around campus was a treat. I pointed everywhere that I had gone, things I had done. We went to the dining hall where a younger student with whom I was having lunch was dipping french fries into chocolate ice cream, exclaiming “I love college!” We finished the campus tour on the field of the Big House, a place well known to me, as I was in the Michigan Marching Band all four years of University. In the MMB, we have a tradition of doing a 100-yard dash in the stadium, endzone to endzone. One of the coolest experiences of my life was sharing that tradition with my students, and running endzone to endzone with them.
 
And I think that’s the most incredible part of AmeriCorps service for me. It truly is a bridge between my past and my future. I’m a kid from the east side, just like so many of my pupils- sometimes, I have to remind myself that I’m the adult in the room. I get to have conversations with kids where we can share our experiences and talk about what the future looks like for us. We get to work together, celebrate our past, what we’ve seen, and prepare for the future, one-speed bag at a time.

In This Photo: Dimitar and several students from DBG with Detroit Lions Linebacker Devon Kennard.