What reconciliation looks like: SpoFI’s 100th graduation and the fathers who made it possible

There’s a moment from our very first 24-7 Dad graduation ceremony and fundraiser in 2018 that I frequently revisit.

Two men were in the room that morning whose histories couldn’t have been more different, and in most versions of the world, those histories would have kept them apart permanently.

One of them, Matt White, had spent years inside Walla Walla prison, moving toward the most violent and ideologically extreme spaces a man can inhabit. He fought to lead a crusade of racial violence inside those prison walls. The other, Marvin Charles of Seattle, had been fighting his own battle on the outside: addiction, crime, and a fatherhood that was slipping through his fingers one day at a time. There came a moment for Marvin when he nearly walked away from his own child. He didn’t. He turned around instead and chose a different path.

Both of them ended up at that first graduation ceremony. Each took the stage to tell their story.

Matt White had responded to God’s call to be a father to his eight-year-old son and through the forgiveness of God abandoned his quest for racial supremacy. Marvin Charles repented of his licentious past. Each had found God on their journeys and rather than fight as enemies, they became friends. A Black man extended grace to a white man who at one time fought to abolish his race.

At the end of that event, they embraced. It’s a picture I’ll never forget.

On April 10, the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative will reunite Matt and Marvin as the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative celebrates the graduation of its 100th 24-7 Dad class.

That number represents something I want to be careful not to rush past.

One hundred classes. Hundreds of Spokane fathers who showed up, did the work, and walked out with something they hadn’t carried in before: skills for self-awareness, tools for communication, and a community of men who understood what they were trying to build.

The 24-7 Dad program, developed by the National Fatherhood Initiative, is built on evidence and grounded in honest conversation. Twelve sessions, two hours each. It asks men to examine where they came from, what they absorbed about fatherhood growing up, and what they want to do differently for their own kids. That’s not a small ask. The men who complete it earn what they take home.

This milestone also lands in SpoFI’s tenth year of service to the Spokane community. What started in January 2016 as a conviction that fathers matter and that transformation is possible has grown into something that now touches families across our city. We didn’t build that. The men did. We just kept the door open.

We sometimes get asked whether programs like this actually work. I understand the question. There’s a lot of well-intentioned effort in the social services world that doesn’t move the needle.

Our graduates are my answer.

These are men who came in carrying weight that most of us can’t fully imagine, and who chose, in that room, with those other dads, to lay some of it down. Their stories didn’t end at graduation. Transformation isn’t an event; it’s a direction. But the direction changed in a 24-7 Dad class, and the evidence of that change has rippled outward into their families and into this community in ways we’ll probably never fully measure.

Reconciliation doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like two men at the end of a graduation ceremony, choosing to see each other clearly, and deciding that what they share matters more than what once divided them.

That is what this program is for. That is what 100 classes have been working toward.