On Friday morning, two dozen community members sat around circular fold-up tables, pleasantly talking and thumbing through paper packets emblazoned with a bold, simple font that read "Tearing Down Walls & Rebuilding Lives."
They had gathered at the Fathers to the Fatherless event to undergo mentorship training, and Dr. David Banks began by addressing them with easy authority and a smile.
"We all ready to get started?" he asked. "I want you all to talk to each other as loud as you can."
Each person turned and began jabbering at their neighbors, nearly shouting, filling the room with an incomprehensible flood of noise. Eventually, Banks motioned for them to be quiet.
"Now, on the count of three, I want you to say 'succeed,'" he said.
They did, and he raised his hand again.
"That is what children need to hear when you're mentoring," he said. "They need to hear a sound, not noise. Mentoring is creating a sound, and we want all of us to be saying the same thing."
Fathers to the Fatherless, a nonprofit group, conducts weekly mentoring sessions for middle and high school students at a handful of schools during which volunteers spend an hour with students, helping them think about who they are, what challenges they face and where they want to go.
Friday's class was an opportunity for new volunteers to learn how to help that process.
Over the course of two hours, Banks guided his trainees, which included a nurse practitioner, a yoga instructor and various community volunteers, through a small course of his own design that laid out the need for and principles of mentoring.
He began by underscoring the complex issues faced by families contending with poverty, generational crime and inadequate education.
"We were created to succeed, but we've been conditioned to survive," he said. "The children that we are mentoring are really dealing with the byproducts of what their parents are going through."
As he spoke, he filled the whiteboard behind him with red and green marker, writing short lists of the qualities needed in mentors and the goals they should have for him or herself and the child.
He argued every child is born with essential questions about whether they are loved, accepted or matter and said the responsibility of adults in that person's life is to turn those questions into statements of affirmation.
If and when children fail to get answers to those questions, they'll turn elsewhere.
"They are emotionally starving," he said. "Gangs are a substitute structure to get those needs met."
At the end of the class, certificate of course completion in hand, Christy Tittsworth said the work being done by Fathers to the Fatherless was a step in the right direction.
"If Chattanooga is going to continue moving forward, we have to start from the bottom," she said. "We have to address the issues we don't want to address."
She said she's been volunteering with the organization for the last year and would encourage others to as well because she's seen progress in the community firsthand.
"Get involved because it doesn't just affect the lives of these children. It affects all of us."
Contact staff writer Emmett Gienapp at egienapp@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6731. Follow him on Twitter @emmettgienapp.