Spirituality drives work with at-risk youth

Brother Francis Boylan

Age: 58
Residence: Clinton
Occupation: Executive director, Boysville
Honored: For helping to nurture Michigan’s at-risk youth and their families

he Bible's take on true Christians, said Brother Francis Boylan, is disarmingly simple: You'll find them helping the widows and orphans.

    Boylan, or Brother Francis as everybody knows him, is a Roman Catholic monk who leads the juvenile-welfare organization called Boysville. He has spent a lifetime working to strengthen fragmenting families in Michigan.

    Boylan chatted in his sunny office recently as neatly groomed young men headed to classes. Although fields and Greek-revival farmhouses surround the rural Clinton campus, a lot has changed since 1948, when Boysville was established south of Ann Arbor on land donated by Henry Ford. Among other things, the nature of those in need has shifted.

    “Nowadays, we’d say ‘single mothers,’ not ‘widows,’ ” said Boylan, who joined Boysville as a science teacher in 1967.

    But the mission remains the same. Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Maura Corrigan, a longtime Boylan admirer and a former Boysville board member, described it as one of finding a way for troubled children to make it to adulthood.

    Initially, Boylan said, the idea was to give kids at Boysville a great education so they could get into college. But, concerned that this approach didn’t address those in greatest need today — single mothers, Boylan decided the organization had to address helping that mother get a job and a home, as well. That approach, he said, gives a child a place to go afterward, other than the military.

    Since assuming leadership at Boysville in 1975, Boylan has multiplied the organization’s work with at-risk boys and girls, many of whom have felony records. There are now 31 centers serving them and their families throughout the state. On any given day, some 1,200 youths live at a Boysville facility.

    One of the newest and most ambitious is the Samaritan Center on Detroit’s east side, the neighborhood that generates the most requests for help from Boysville. There, Boylan and a small army of social workers and other professionals are transforming the old Mercy Hospital into what he called the country’s largest one-stop center for social services. Those include an on-site residential program for 60 children, free health care and job counseling — complete with help on daycare and transportation, so that mothers can get a job that pays a living wage.

    “It is kind of amazing,” Boylan said, “especially to accomplish all in one year.”

    But the results, children who’ve turned around lives that had run off track, justify the exertions. First Lt. Ted Monfette, commander of the State Police’s criminal-investigation section, was one of those youngsters. Monfette lived at Boysville from 1968 to 1970 and three decades later still speaks fondly of the structure, support and understanding he found there.

    “There was a lot of guidance,” he said. “I’d talk to Brother Francis a lot. He was always willing to listen.”

— Michael H. Hodges