One Love Sports Academy founder Jamaal Wornum doesn’t just help Boston youth find their way—he sees himself in them.

Wornum started One Love as a memorial basketball tournament in honor of his late brother, Aaron, a 25-year-old man with a passion for music and youth empowerment who was shot to death on Sumner Street in Dorchester in 2011.

Jamaal used the tournament as a starting point for the development of a sports league with several programs in his brother’s memory.

Currently, the league is based at Mary Hannon Park on Dudley Street in Dorchester. It runs through August 30.

According to Wornum, One Love “started essentially as me wanting to do a memorial basketball tournament in Aaron’s honor on top of me being an outreach worker for the city of Boston. There was a lack of resources and recreational sports activities for kids from 12 to 18 years of age, so I made a decision to start a basketball league for those kids but still keep it in memory of my little brother.

“The hard part was that during the winter and the fall, a lot of the kids I had built relationships with in the summer I would see during my job as an outreach coordinator [in reports or court]. So, I decided to extend what I do during the season.”

In 2014, he consolidated his efforts into One Love, largely funding the organization out of his own pocket. Since then, he has continued to expand his offerings in an effort to reach more kids in Dorchester and surrounding neighborhoods. One Love currently offers a sports league, workout program, financial literacy course, yoga course, unity healing circle, book club, and more.

Warnum is thrilled by One Love’s progress.

“It grew from me having 50 kids to me having 125 kids, so now it’s a full-fledged non-profit,” he said. “Its focus is on offering these kids proper resources, creating a safe space for them to grow, develop, play, all that stuff, and at the same time, just providing them with different avenues or outlooks that they may not get if they’re not involved in the league. It has grown into something that the community expects and that the kids need.”

He added: “When I was young, I was in a lot of the positions that these kids are in. The same opportunities that [youth organizations] offered for me, I’m doing that for the next generation coming up. I don’t have any magic tricks—I’m just there. I’m just available.”

Neema Avashia, a civics teacher at Boston Public Schools and liaison to One Love, recalled her interactions with Wornum very positively.

“I got to know him first in his capacity as a streetworker for the city of Boston,” she said. “We had some young people who were struggling, and we were trying to think creatively about how to support them. He was a friend of a friend, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll come in. It’s not during my work hours, but that doesn’t matter to me. I care about the kids. I’ll come in, I’ll mentor kids, I’ll check in, I’ll build relationships.’ And he started coming in on his own volition every week, week-and-a-half to meet with young people. To try to get them to programming, to support them, help them to see that there are people in the community who care about them and are invested in them.” And that all predates the organization, said Avashia. “But that’s Jamaal. That ethic, that level of care and investment in young people, is what makes his work so important. He will go to every extent to make sure that young people are getting what they need.”

She added, “He’s really good at seeing the relationship between what happens in school and what happens out of school. With a lot of organizations in the city, there’s a hard line. But Jamal understands that there has to be a dialogue between school-based programming and out-of-school programming.”

Tome Barros, a personal friend of Wornum who has volunteered with One Love, echoed Avashia’s sentiments. “Jamaal’s had quite the lifetime experience – some positive, some not so great. But he has been able to balance all the trials and tribulations of his life and managed to be on the right side of doing some amazing work. Any time I talk to someone about him, I use these words: Jamaal is the 21st century version of what a nonprofit should look like. What he’s building is grassroots and community-built.

“If you look at a lot of the non-profits that are out there now, the executive director doesn’t know what our youth truly need in terms of full wrap-around services. They may know sports, and arts, and how to keep kids busy, but what separates Jamaal is that he understands those wraparound services, those certain traumas he went through as a child. So really,” said Barros,” he’s looking at it from a preventative lens, where he wants to shield these youths from what he went through in his youth.”

As One Love continues to grow, Wornum hopes that it becomes “the standard-bearer” of how non-profit organizations deal with and interact with youth.
“I want kids to grow within the organization. If we have a kid at 11, by 16 he should know where he wants to be in life and where his path is. If we get him at 16, by 18 he should acquire job skills. As long as we’re elevating and evolving each year as the kids grow, I’m fine with that. Actually, great with that.”

Avashia adds: “I hope that this is an organization that people show up for. I’ve worked in Boston for a long time, and there are a lot of organizations that say they’re working with the young people of Boston, but they’re only working with a subset. A lot say they’re working with the most vulnerable kids, and they’re not. That’s Jamaal’s story. He was the kid that struggled. He knows very intimately what it means to be the kid that nobody was paying attention to that got lost. There’s not many organizations in Boston where the leadership has that experience.”

To learn more about One Love, sign up for its services, volunteer, or donate, visit onelovesports.org.