The Good Road

Funding for the good road has been provided by-- There's a whole lot of good out there, wherever you look-- in our towns, in our communities, in the world.

And Toyota engineers vehicles to help you discover more of it, with off-road machines designed to explore off the beaten path like Sequoia, Forerunner, and Tundra i-Force Max, all of which feature traction technology that goes the distance.

So the next time you head out, looking for more good, Toyota can take you there.

Proud sponsor of the Good Road.

Toyota.

Let's go places.

Can, looking back push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Billie Holliday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Massive act of concern.

Saint Thomas is one of the most beautiful, most traveled islands in the Caribbean.

And if you've been there, likely on a cruise or a day trip from Puerto Rico, this may not be the first thing that you mind.

And while tourists continue to flock to Rock City, as it's called, few realize the constant struggle going on, just across the street from the megayachts and cruise ships of downtown Charlotte Amalie.

But this little gem and the Virgin Islands, as a whole, has produced an outsized number of Olympians and world champions.

Even more remarkable, not an insignificant number from a single family dynasty.

A family determined to give back to the island that made them who they are.

[music playing] Julius Jackson knows everyone on the island, and everyone on the island knows Julius.

And as a world-ranking super middleweight boxer and 2008 Olympian-turned-manager, philanthropist, entrepreneur, culinary ambassador, cookbook author, and all-around fun guy to hang with, there's no shortage of reasons why.

And if you don't know Julius yet, you definitely know his father, Julian Jackson.

Julian is not only a former three-time world champion, boxing hall-of-famer, and one of the hardest hitters of all time.

He also runs a boxing development program out of one of the most impoverished housing projects on the island.

Unfortunately, Julian had a service to attend.

Did we mention he's a pastor?

But Julius agreed to take us to his father's gym, where he is still heavily involved.

The gym that turned Julius and several of his brothers into champions and Olympians.

We've been here, I think, maybe 15 years.

My dad runs the program called I Believe I Can Fly boxing program.

This is where we became Olympians, me and my brother.

We've created national amateur champions out of this little place in the projects.

What's up?

Coach Joey has been in and around boxing since third grade and now helps train youth like Adan and Abdullah.

I forgot that.

Yeah, that's.

That's a Virgin Island most important.

So, yeah, this is where-- this is where we do it, man, you know?

Blood, sweat and tears, they say, right?

Champions come out of this place.

Julius, this is generational, too.

It's a crazy story.

My uncle, who is older than my father, and he trained my father.

My father was a champion of the Virgin Islands, and then he ended up training other boxers, as well as Julian Jackson.

My dad.

No kidding.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Julian Jackson became three-time world champion my father was training him.

Yeah.

That is so cool.

And I was one of Julian's spar mates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now, Julian and I training Julius and his brothers and cousins and some other-- the other boxers.

And then they would teach their kids, their grandkids.

Correct.

That's our way of giving back.

Julius, how many of your brothers have come through here?

All of them.

All of them.

My sister boxed for a little while too.

Really?

My sister joined.

The one job I don't want to have is being a sparring partner for any of y'all.

I mean, the first thing you notice when you walk in here is the imagine, believe, achieve.

Yes.

I just love that, you know?

Yeah, that's that's Joey's saying right there.

Yeah.

So when they come in here, we tell them, you're going to be a champ.

You're going to be a champ, not just in boxing, but whatever you do, you're going to be a champion at it.

What makes a good trainer?

The heart.

First of all, you have to love the sport.

You have to love the boxers.

And you're not just training them in the gym because every boxer is not going to be a champion.

But you want to teach them about life, period.

That's big.

You want to mold them to be a better person.

My son box here.

Wilfred.

My son is now a chef.

In the military, yeah.

Yeah, we talked about that.

There we go.

There's a theme there.

Yeah, there's a theme.

It's boxing and eating food.

Yeah.

Tell us where we are.

Yes, this is a Paul M. Pearson Gardens.

This is the the name of the community, and we're right across the street from Yacht Haven Grande.

Yeah, right next to the super wealthy?

Super wealthy mega yacht.

That's right.

People who are living in the poverty section.

Yes.

Yeah, that's right.

Right across the road.

How many people walk by this place or drive by this place and have no idea there are miracles that are happening inside of here?

No idea.

A lot of people don't know.

This is what I love about boxing or a trainer.

You're one-on-one with these kids.

Like you said, you know them?

Right.

You're part of their life.

That's right.

You're part of crafting whatever it is that they think they can do.

That's right.

And you will see the difference when they come in here and train.

Yeah.

Now they know, why, somebody loves me, you know?

Someone cares for me?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And then you see them throwing punches better, you know?

Speaking of that, I noticed the young kids are all very curious about what happens in here.

These guys are heroes to them.

Yes.

You see them going, they're putting on the gloves.

Go in the bag, and just-- They're going after it.

Yeah.

Everybody seems pretty proud.

Yeah, we are proud of where we're from.

Yeah.

There's a lot of history in these little islands.

So it's such a blessing.

We couldn't believe that we will be out there boxing against the world, you know?

Yeah.

It's a small island with a big heart.

That's right.

Have you ever taken a blow from Julius?

I have, but I hit him back.

[laughter] And then, wait.

2, 3, 4.

To the left.

I can't relax and be long, you know?

We got lucky towards the end of the day, as Julian Jackson was able to drop by.

Prompts, like big and strong.

Yeah.

Hi.

How's it going?

Yeah, [inaudible].

Good to see you.

How you doing?

But it's a pleasure, man.

It is?

Yeah, no, thank you very much.

Yeah.

What have you guys here?

We were talking earlier about the fact that a lot of people can come right by here and not know the history of this gym.

I came from the soil of these islands, you know?

Of this island.

you know what I'm saying?

Right.

And growing up here wasn't as easy as you think.

Yeah, but I'll tell you what, it took a lot, for us to make it.

I mean, he grew up your kids.

Then, they automatically say, hey, is he the next you?

Right.

Right.

You had to break your own ground, and then you opened it up for all these kids.

They were talking about sending me off.

Willie was my old trainer's name.

Willie-- William George.

And I said if he brought me this far, you know what I'm saying?

Why would I leave?

You know what I'm saying?

And then [inaudible] came in.

Yeah, and his father, [inaudible].

He trained me as well.

How old were you at that time?

I started boxing when I was about 12 years old, graduated from 12th grade.

I did not get the opportunity to go to the Olympics.

Why?

Because I think Carter boycotted.

So that really messed with me.

I wanted to go so bad, and my trainer decided to turn me pro.

How many sons now that have been to the Olympics?

Is it?

I got three sons.

Three sons?

Yes.

What was that like when you called him the first time to let him know that-- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was in school.

You're rolling around with him.

He's a celebrity, man.

Yeah, man.

[interposing voices] I know, right?

I see where the coolness comes from, though.

[laughter] No, he's-- yeah.

He's not there yet.

He ain't there yet.

[laughter] We love this country.

We love the Virgin Islands.

I'm proud to be a Virgin Islander, you know?

Wherever I go, I display that.

I could have stayed in Las Vegas, but I believe God told me that this is where my destiny is.

And I came back home.

And I trained in this gym as an amateur.

And I came back, and I met the guy who was in charge.

His name was Sidney Isaac.

Sidney, right.

Yeah.

And, he said, Julian, I'm going to retire, man.

He says, man, maybe you could take over the gym.

And I said, great.

I take over the gym.

And then, boom, things just started to happen, man.

So what was it that you were known for?

Because you were one of the hardest hitters.

Yeah.

Were you a knockout guy?

What was your boxing style?

Well, yeah, I was a puncher.

I was a boxer puncher, yeah.

I found out when I was an amateur, he gave me an opportunity to spar with a professional.

And I'll never forget it.

I'm a teenager.

I was a little timid, a little shaky.

So my trainer told me to fake the jab to the head and throw a straight right to the-- Solar plexus?

Solar plex.

I threw the jab, and it opened up, and I went, boom.

And he went down.

And I was like, oh, my god, I'm sorry!

[laughter] My trainer yelled out on me, "hey, no, don't do that.

That's natural.

That's what it is."

Yeah, yeah.

But after that I realized-- I said, wow, there's really something about this.

Yeah.

So has Julius ever pulled that punch on you?

Yes, he did.

[laughter] [inaudible] that story right now.

And I'm like-- That's the same exact thing I did.

He taught me-- he said, you know what?

You're training him good.

Yeah.

[laughter] It was very nice meeting you.

Yeah, man.

Do I call you Julian or Mr. Jackson?

Julian, man.

Brother Jackson.

Brother Jackson.

Julius is a busy man, and not the least of his many projects is his role as manager of My Brother's Workshop Cafe in downtown Charlotte Amalie.

My Brother's Workshop is a youth development program founded by Scott Bradley in 2007 to engage with the disadvantaged youth of the island he loves.

What started as vocational training around construction expanded to a woodworking shop and then to a bakery and cafe in 2015.

They've also developed engineering and marine programs and have a brand new facility in the works.

We sat down with Julius and MBW trainer Elise Earhart in Megan's Bay to discuss the work they do.

Give us a little bit of a sense of the island itself.

Yeah, yeah.

it's a tough place, man.

The parts of the community that live under that poverty level, it's a very big number.

It's like 72%.

The attractiveness for fast money is very real.

They see it.

Their neighbors are doing it.

Their uncles are doing it.

They see the guys with cars, and they got good jewelry on money.

That's all they see.

And so it's like, that's the option.

There was a guy in Alabama Village, a guy named Tim, who had been through it all, been to prison, been shot.

And he called it the fast dollar versus a slow dollar.

And he was like, I realized now much later, I want to go for the slow dollar, family, being able to raise my kids.

And the slow dollar is hard.

I mean, we all got to make a dollar-- Still.

It's still tough.

--and so there's a couple ways to do it.

We really have to be real them on that because I have peers who have done that and are still doing it and haven't gotten caught.

That happens out here.

That is an option.

But is it the best one?

Right, Yeah.

That's what you got to consider yourself.

Is it the best one?

[music playing] Our main objective is to provide an environment that our students can really develop and grow and find themselves.

Most of the time, we're not training chefs.

We're not training hospitality industry people.

We have that as the trade they can learn while they're with us.

But our goal is to give them things that's going to make them well-rounded and take them to anywhere they want to be, and they can be successful.

You can give a man a carrot cake, or you could teach a man to make a carrot cake or whatever, right?

You can.

[laughter] No, but what you're doing is you're taking kids that otherwise may not know where to go or what to do and have the skills.

And then how do you incorporate it into the cafe?

So one thing that I love about our organization, the ratio of trainers to trainees is really healthy.

Sometimes it's close to one to one.

I think we try to max out at one to four.

You don't you don't necessarily get that one-on-one time in a school situation or maybe another vocational situation, yeah.

I love to take the opportunity to work very slowly and deliberately with some of the students.

And when they're on the line with me, and when they're cooking, it's like really just breaking stuff down.

What their skill sets are usually-- they start off pretty small.

And so that can build their self esteem and, and take them from, well, I can't do that to you can do that.

You see, you're doing it better than yesterday.

I can make a whole meal.

Now how cool is that to see them start to get a-- Oh, man.

--the excitement?

It's amazing.

There's nothing-- no money can pay for that.

I have a few students who still come back and give us stories and ask us, I'm doing this now.

What do I do?

Or one of my students that he works close to us now downtown, he comes to me and says, I want to do something for my birthday, but I don't want to be on the block and hang out with the guys and drink.

What can I do?

I'm just not going to do anything.

There's so much you can do.

He's like, what do you mean?

I was like, we can go to Puerto Rico.

He's like, we can do that?

Yeah, bro, 57 bucks.

He's like, no way.

Yeah, so I went with him.

And having that relationship, that's priceless.

You can't-- Yeah.

And both of you guys have an unlikely path.

I think all of us do I guess at some point.

Everyone's unique, right?

But I think, what did you see in the organization?

I was searching for something that was more community-based, and I was longing to feel more connected to the island and have this need to contribute, while being able to continue my culinary trajectory.

That's pretty cool.

I can be like a chef, and I can contribute.

I feel pretty dang lucky, actually.

Yeah, and I love that too, because really, that connecting you to where you want to go, that's the program.

There's also discipline to this, too.

Yeah, that's babying them.

We talk about this all the time.

How do we teach a mindset, you know?

You can't.

We just have to hopefully bring them to the spot where, like, I need to change how I think.

We have this talk with them often.

How I got to where I'm at?

I said, well, I just do everything.

If my boss said, do that-- all right, let's say I'm cooking on the line, and the boss says, I need someone to mop the floor, I go like this.

That's the guy who's going to get promoted first.

Right.

Or we have a thing here we call paleo, someone who just does something for everybody all the time.

We look down at that person.

But I'm telling you right now, I am him, you know?

I tell them, I'm that guy.

No, we have to be very real with them because they're on the street.

They know the streets.

They're like, yo, people talk game all day.

This is real and I'm doing it.

This is legal.

This is legal, all right?

Because in a dime, they could be gone.

They could be gone.

[music playing] We've made y'all all talk so much, but you haven't even been able to eat your [inaudible].

We eat these every day.

[laughter] We nibble.

I mean, what do you love about the island?

Why do you like-- is it color of the water?

[chuckles] Because that's not bad.

No, not bad, even a little bit.

It's the water and the land and the people.

I like to interact with my environment, and I get so many opportunities to do that here.

I like to be on the water.

I like to scuba dive and free dive and snorkel and swim.

Julius knows this.

Everyone knows Julius.

So I love the small community aspect of it.

And that also does tie back into the sort of work that we do where you feel like you're just in a big neighborhood.

And what better place to do that than a cafe?

I mean, everybody's going to come there at some point.

Yeah, yeah, get coffee, get a little treat, yeah.

The last stop with Julius was to check out the future site of the My Brother's workshop's new facilities.

We also got a chance to chat with MBW executive director Jenny Hawkes.

[music playing] All right, Jenny, you lead the way.

Perfect.

We're just going to get right over here to the front of the building.

Wow, this is it, huh?

This is it.

So we're on our future property that we just purchased, and we're looking at a little less than four acres for the total campus, which will consist of three main buildings.

And we're looking at building one.

What will be in building one?

Building one will have 10,000 square feet of an industrial kitchen, which Julius will have command of and-- Excited.

[laughter] And then upstairs, we'll have a 5,000 square foot banquet hall.

So for events, for ourselves, but also for other nonprofits on the island or government agencies, birthday parties, graduations.

[music playing] So we'll have the industrial kitchen, so we'll be able to do industrial-style baking.

And when we have hard times come by, hard gains-- Disasters.

--big things happen, we'll be able to help out.

We did that already from our small cafe.

We were able to do 37,000 meals within three months.

What?

Yeah.

When was this?

Wow.

Right after Irma.

Irma.

Irma, Irma.

Irma hit.

But with this kitchen, we'll be able to help way more people do a lot more meals.

And then you'll be serving virtually-- what's the catchment?

the whole islands, other islands?

Well, to just give you the idea of the scope of what this campus will be, we serve about 100 to 150 students a year right now.

This campus is going to have the capacity to do over 1,000 students a year.

And we will be able to go into a younger age group.

Our age group is 16 to 24 currently.

But anybody who's above 24, that doesn't mean that they don't want to have some extra training or even switch careers.

So we're going to have evening courses.

So is it kind of a workforce development kind of program?

That's really what it is?

I mean, that is our number one mission is the vocational training.

We also believe in a holistic approach, so we do like to work with the students on mentoring and mental health counseling.

So we have licensed social workers who are full-time staff members.

Because if we get you a job, and you haven't learned how to communicate with your supervisor, how to control your anger, if you have some of that, then you're just not going to be successful.

Being in an urban-style community, it was a little different because it's a Caribbean.

And it's very unique.

I've traveled a lot as a kid, and I've seen the differences.

And so helping our students through that to dissect those thoughts and the things they hear on the street.

Like, if a man step on your shoe, that's disrespect.

Hold on a second, what if it was a mistake, you know?

[laughter] Those little things actually are really big for our generation here and our youth and helping guide them, build that relationship with them so that they hear us is one of our big, big tools here that we use.

So your life experiences that you grew up here, you didn't grow up here.

I did not.

So what is that collaboration like?

Our big rule is we don't want you to be anybody but yourself.

Yeah, I love it because we locally have almost a connotation to outsiders that they're just here to take over.

Our parents passed that down to us.

Our grandparents, to pass that down to us.

And they get to see someone that's not like them help with that for nothing in return.

Wow.

Nothing in return.

You could see their attitudes, their face, their body language change because, me, who is like them, is showing them that that's not always true.

[music playing] We talked about Irma.

How do you guys plan for the possibility of another massive hurricane?

Well, one, structurally, we've got to make sure it's steel and really strong.

Really, we just believe that it's going to be OK.

It's almost a metaphor for life, right?

There's going to be stuff that happened.

This building, though, is being built like a bunker because we do want to be able to do disaster when it happens.

So it is being built with redundancy systems.

St. John, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, you all kind of band together in those really, really hard times.

Yep, yep.

And that's what this building can also be is, if we have another island that was hit by a storm, you could mass produce meals here, package them, and ship them out for people in need.

So it is being designed to obviously serve the current island, but it is getting ready for the disasters.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of the programs that you guys are doing, so this would be great.

Thanks for meeting us out this morning.

Yeah, thank you.

[inaudible] Yeah.

There's a lot riding on the next generation of Virgin Islanders.

And the Jacksons and the folks at My Brother's Workshop are determined to provide firm ground to stand on.

As St. Thomas and the rest of the Caribbean prepare for an uncertain future in the face of climate change and increased storms, their commitment to their community and its future is what brings them hope.

But their willingness to do the work is what will bring them success.

In the words of Coach Joey, imagine, believe, achieve.

Funding for The Good Road has been provided by-- Can looking back push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Billie Holiday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Massive act of concern.

[music playing] [applause] What makes a good road?

Blazing a trail, making a difference, being unafraid to take the path of most resistance.

Toyota has a beyond zero vision for a carbon-neutral future that lets you find your own good road with Toyota's electrified lineup, including battery electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fuel cell electric vehicles designed to get you where you want to go, from work to school or wherever your adventures take you.

Toyota is all about paving good roads.

Proud sponsor of The Good Road, Toyota, let's go places.

[music playing]