Shant’a Miller-Synaker, founder of Parents Against Bullying (P.A.B), and Jay Burton, founder of Negative Into Positive (N.I.P), have teamed up with Building Better Futures to give back to the youth in the Newport News Juvenile Detention Center. Together they have volunteered to facilitate sessions on leadership, empowerment, and overcoming obstacles with the goal to encourage the young people to become leaders by taking negative actions and decisions and turning them into something positive.

In one specific session, Miller-Synaker and Burton worked with the youth to express their leadership skills by creating their own individual, one of a kind t-shirts. After discussing experiences they have had and what they learned from them, each participant created a t-shirt that shared an obstacle that has captured positive outcomes and how that outcome was visualized through creative art. Not only did they work together and encourage one another as they were making their shirts, it also lead to conversations concerning how they could sell their shirts to the community.

Miller-Synaker and Burton plan to continue to work with the inspiring youth facilitating topics of entrepreneurship, business planning, creating proposals and delivering to investors.