As a child growing up in East St. Louis during the 1970s, Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee didn’t know how far her talents would take her—but the local community center was her key to discovering the answer. At the Mary Brown Center, she became involved in cheerleading and, ultimately, track and field. “Being surrounded by people who believed in me and saw the potential that I did not know that I had, and just giving of their time—it evolved, and turned into opportunities,” she says. The experience also instilled in her the values of hard work and giving back, which would become hallmarks of her life.
Joyner-Kersee went on to attend UCLA on a basketball scholarship—but disaster struck in 1980, during her freshman year. An asthma diagnosis jeopardized her athletic career; and her mother died unexpectedly. Seeking a lifeline, Joyner-Kersee returned to the Mary Brown Center.
“I wanted to go somewhere where people were pouring into me,” she says. But she discovered her beloved center had closed. “I just start thinking, Where do the young people go? That was the beginning of me wanting to try to reopen that center.”
She returned to continue her studies at UCLA, where she excelled in college basketball and won a silver medal in the heptathlon at her first Olympics in 1984. But the center was always at the back of her mind.
Four years later, after competing in her second Olympics and winning two gold medals (in the long jump and the heptathlon), Joyner-Kersee fulfilled another dream by establishing the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation. While the foundation’s physical building wasn’t completed until 2000, one of her first acts as founder, in 1988, was chartering a plane to fly 110 children from East St. Louis to New York City for the iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There, Joyner-Kersee joined fellow Olympians Carl Lewis, Janet Evans and her late sister-in-law, Florence Griffith-Joyner—fittingly on the parade’s Marvel Float, in honor of their Olympic achievements.
Afterward, Joyner-Kersee chose to stay in St. Louis and run the foundation herself. “It was very important that our young people see me in person,” she says. “Not just read about me or see me on television, but know that I am from this community, just like them—and even though I might not walk in their shoes, I have walked the same pavement.” Joyner-Kersee instills a can-do mindset through the “Winning in Life” curriculum, which grounds all the programs offered at the JJK Foundation.
The curriculum is built around 14 principles, including risk-taking, confidence, dedication, goals and wellness. The wellness principle serves as the ideal vehicle for making athletics central to children’s lives—an important component of the foundation. And the program is making an impact: In the past 5 years, it has gone from serving 3,000 to 10,000 families annually.
East St. Louis has struggled economically since industries and well-paying jobs left the area, in the mid-20th century. Today, 31 percent of the residents in this predominantly Black city live in poverty—so Joyner-Kersee offers the Foundation’s programs at significantly reduced rates. Its daily after-school program, which provides activities, hot meals and transportation for students ages 6 to 18, costs families only $50 per year.
JJK Summer Camp, an eight-week program for kids ages 4 to 18, operates daily and includes two meals, sports activities, gardening, academic enrichment to bridge summer-learning gaps, and weekly educational field trips. This program costs $200 for the summer.
These initiatives receive some government grants but are funded largely through donors. Tickets to the foundation’s annual fall gala, known as Sequins, Suits & Sneakers, are usually sold out—and Joyner-Kersee matches all funds up to $7,291, in honor of her record-setting Olympic score in the heptathlon.
“What we’re doing here at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center, through our after-school program, is providing opportunity,” Joyner-Kersee says. Reflecting on the importance of after-school programs, she expresses her desire to further expand the offerings that “Winning in Life” provides. She is already working with partners in several cities, including Gary, Indiana, and South Gate, California; and she plans to take the program international.
In a city that’s been all but written off, Joyner-Kersee is reworking the script of what’s possible for its residents, especially its young people; and she’s inspiring others to do so as well. “We’re letting them know that the impossible is probable,” she says. “Our environment should not define us. We define the environment. We are the narrators of our stories.”
This story originally appeared in the January/February issue of ESSENCE Magazine.
