Бывший инженер в Афганистане основал центр STEM для детей из бедных районов Южной Каролины

BARNWELL COUNTY — Steven Brown remembers growing up in the rural small town of Williston and being told he couldn’t be an engineer. In 2009, he went to Afghanistan on his first job: helping rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure as an electrical engineer. It was that 12-month experience of training Afghan locals and helping them rebuild that later motivated him to come back to his hometown to inspire children into science, technology, engineering, mathematics or medical careers. In 2013, he founded the nonprofit Dreams, Imagination and Gift Development Program, DIG DP. “We believe big dreams come from small places,” he said, repeating the motto of a nonprofit he founded to help children who were like him. The enrichment and mentorship program is now in its 12th year and striving for a permanent home in a proposed DIG Stem Center. The nonprofit has raised about $260,000 since launching its fundraising campaign earlier this fall. Brown said the DIG Stem Center’s campaign goal is $1.2 million. The nonprofit has steadily grown through the years to host summer camps and a local STEM festival that features competitions and hands-on STEM opportunities. Today, Brown’s group provides afterschool programming and long-term mentoring to more than 350 children annually who come from schools in Aiken, Barnwell and Allendale counties. Many of these children come from areas and backgrounds similar to Brown’s, impoverished and lacking in opportunity, he said. An arm of the Federal Reserve previously included Brown in a 12-week training program on how to create project proposals and secure funding for rural communities like Williston. At its core, DIG is about building access to STEM jobs in an area of South Carolina with the highest rates of poverty, Brown said. About 28.5 percent of Barnwell County residents fall below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 14 percent of South Carolinians live beneath the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. To date, about 14 students have gone on to become engineers or are pursuing engineering degrees, a fact Brown, who grew up in a double-wide trailer, is especially proud of. Why settle for less in a career because of where you come from, he asked. Trayan Parker, 25, is one of them. Parker was among the first to join DIG when it was finding its footing. He initially wanted to be a welder. He watched Brown give a presentation in school one day that enraptured him. The mentoring network has been the most important piece that has shaped his life, he said. DIG has been a part of his life for more than a decade and continues to be a part of it. He works as an industrial engineer at Michelin in Lexington after working for Norfolk Southern and attending the University of South Carolina. The proposed center would include a tech lab, a gathering space for mentors and mentees, athletics facilities and class space. The nonprofit has relied on community support over the last decade in using meeting spaces, such as churches. The existing afterschool programs would remain in place, but give children a gathering space and a place for hands-on experience. “I feel like having our own space is going to provide consistency, hosting competitions, bring the community together and give people a third place people can look forward to going to,” Brown said. For 18-year-old Madison Wright, DIG showed her that the sky’s the limit because of opportunities to participate in regional and national engineering competitions, such as Future Cities. “The mentors helped build our confidence to be able to compete with anyone else,” she said. She’s studying nuclear engineering at Charleston Southern University and wouldn’t be there without Brown’s program.