Core Problem #1: Unaddressed, systemic cycles of abuse are fueling an epidemic of mental unwellness, addiction, trauma, and violence.

Core Problem #2: Corrupt individuals that are supported, enabled, protected, or hidden by an institutional apparatus can cause significant damage by perpetuating these cycles. These individuals are often difficult to hold accountable and remove. These same institutions do little to acknowledge and support the people, spaces, systems and structures left picking up the pieces.

Funding Problem: Sustainable community centers call for long-term economic development models that require significant capital investment and a long runway for return. There are too few funding organizations who are structured to fund these efforts, especially in degrading communities where funding is needed the most. Those that exist, including major American universities with massive dowries, can do more to acknowledge and fund nearby community centers that deal with the consequences caused by their negligence and degradation, past and present.

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“There’s a lot of people who would no way in Hell do my day to day,” says Jerry Norris, the founder of the Fledge, a radically inclusive social organization and multifaceted community center operating out of a former church in Lansing, Michigan. Like other cities in the state, such as Detroit, Kalamazoo, Flint, Benton Harbor, and Muskegon Heights, Lansing often finds itself in listicles chronicling some of the most dangerous cities in America. Michigan, of course, has long watched many of the industries that supported or even built their economy shrink or vanish, leaving many families behind, pollution in the lakes, and various ghost structures in the cities.

Like the previous case studies emerging out of Radiical Systems, it’s important to understand that highlighting a city’s more beleaguered elements or populace does not negate the healthy, happy or positive data nodes, but rather emphasizes the humans and systems supporting the marginalized, while pointing out failed practices, policies and entrenched corruption. Like a dermatologist scanning seemingly immaculate skin, the smallest detail may engender concern.

Changemakers like Jerry Norris are ferociously optimistic and usually obsessive to a degree when it comes to helping the vulnerable in their community due to and often despite some core personal wound or compounded wounds, healed over enough to become scar-tissue armor for an indomitable spirit. Jerry’s conjoined impetus, intention and engine, combined with a potent professional skill-set, including a savant-level mathematical mind housed in a formerly elite D-1 wrestler’s body, together infuse and reverberate out through all layers of his neighborhood, city, and state, disruptively revealing points of rot and sparks of beauty throughout the entire apparatus, all challenged with righteous indignation and a borderline manic level of empathy.

Community centers like the Fledge don’t just support people negatively affected by toxified or failing systems or the pollutants therein, they serve as a hub and forum to discuss and critique them. The Fledge is a space where neighbors can organize and gather in order to improve or fix these systems, safely, outside of the oft-complicit institutional complex, whether that be an actual dogmatic religious structure, a corporation with a closed HR culture, a rigidly partisan news outlet of any size, or a university covering its tracks. Formal structures, such as city council or even local PTA forums can be manipulated by proctors or those in charge as a means to alienate or outright silence citizens coming forward with valid grievances, while using state resources (police and security hired by the state or entity) to intimidate and censor. Not only this, in 2024, American politicians at all levels rarely speak to journalists outside of their own party silo, and if they do, it’s usually an exercise in gaslighting and other bad faith tactics.

Extreme empathy sometimes comes with extreme views, but pointing out, let’s say, “a few bad apples” in a police force must come with a full diagnostic of the department, up through top brass. Simultaneously, this means not needlessly throwing the baby out with the bathwater. America’s political binary often creates unhealthy, polarized, dangerously extreme positions on complex situations. A scenario of this sort will be explored more deeply in our upcoming Bay Area case study, which centers around a potential summer recall of the current Oakland Mayor, Sheng Thao, filed by former retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brenda Harbin-Forté and fueled by Seneca Scott (a cousin of Coretta Scott King), a potent social media muckraker and mayoral hopeful who lost to Thao last election cycle. After the election, Mayor Thao (who assumed office January 9th, 2023) infamously fired the former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong after an expensive third party review headed by federal monitor Robert Warshaw pointed to internal department issues regarding the downplaying of two misconduct cases. This firing echoed the 2019 termination of Chicago’s retiring Black Police Superintendent, Eddie Johnson, who was discovered sleeping on the job and lying about it afterwards, as former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot-who did the firing-put it. Johnson initially blamed his failure to take his blood pressure medication and said he had a few drinks with dinner earlier in the evening.

Johnson himself was named superintendent in 2016 by then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who had just fired Chicago’s Superintendent Garry McCarthy after the release of a video showing officer Jason Van Dyke shooting teenager Laquan McDonald, one of several infamous videos that spurred public protests, cultural unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, Emanuel was “scrambling,” as we so often hear, to “restore public confidence.” Rash decisions made due to mounting pressure from an enraged populace, though quenching in the short term, can frequently lead to bigger problems down the road. For instance, Chicago in 2021 under Mayor Lori Lightfoot recorded the most killings in a quarter-century (797) and more than 3,500 shootings-which was 1,400 more than what was recorded in 2019 when Lightfoot first took office. The pandemic didn’t help. In February 2023, Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election, ending her run as the city’s first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve in the position. At the time of her loss, a poll showed that 63% of the Chicago citizenry actually did not feel safe in their own city. Lightfoot was the first Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose re-election.

Many believe former-Chief Armstrong’s firing in Oakland was a poorly-thought-out reaction to calls demanding Thao and other mayors across America to “defund the police,” despite Armstrong himself being Black, which is relevant considering ongoing efforts to make precincts and other law enforcement organizations more racially inclusive, especially at the highest levels. Armstrong is suing the Mayor and the city of Oakland for wrongful termination and violation of his First Amendment rights. Of course, true equality is all Americans being treated equally under the law, but the practice of new administrators firing long-running public servants with deep ties to the community on murky pretenses in order to bring in their own allies can be problematic.

On March 25th, a press release on The City of Oakland's official website announced the hiring of a new incoming Police Chief, Floyd Mitchell, who will replace the interim-OPD Chief Darren Allison, who has led the Bright Side’s department for more than a year. Mitchell, who also is Black, was most recently the Chief of Lubbock, Texas, where he served for five years before retiring in 2023. This hiring ends a long and tumultuous search, firmly addressing one fervent vector of attack put forth by Thao’s staunch critics, like the aforementioned Judge Brenda Harbin-Forté, who was relieved of her post on the Police Commission in 2022 by Mayor Thao, who called it a “holdover position” before saying she would be hiring her own person for the role. Judge Harbin-Forté said she sees her removal from the Commission as a "badge of honor."

“I urge the people of Oakland to give Chief Mitchell a chance,” Deacon Bennie Walsh, the Former President of the Temple Chapter of the NAACP said of the former Texas police chief. “He is a good man and very community-minded. Chief Mitchell brought back officer-community engagement programs that made a huge difference in rebuilding trust and respect with the police. Whenever we had problems, he rolled up his sleeves and said we’re going to work things out together.”

Former-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong’s case remains high-profile. As long as a recall threat exists, and perhaps even if it doesn’t, Oakland’s populace will likely continue to wage ideological war with one another regarding the exacerbating realities of crime, corruption, urban decay, and the dissonance between the most basic tenets of common sense and a host of policies that weaponize and misappropriate the rhetoric and infrastructure around valid human rights concerns (see: how the rights of the un-housed and soft-on-crime policies affect the public safety of average citizens).

In light of Mayor Thao’s year-long search, it’s clear government decisions can take excruciatingly long to be made, let alone implemented. On the same day the new Chief of Police was announced (March 25th, 2024), Oakland Council member Treva Reid announced plans to collaborate with California Governor Gavin Newsom and his trove of state resources to clean out several blocks of homeless encampments and caravans of blighted, blown-out vehicles and detritus, with the Hagenberger Corridor on Leet Drive near the airport first on the docket. This was another major area of criticism by Seneca Scott, who clearly lit a fire under the Mayor and Governor’s skin. The question, which will be further explored in the next case study, is whether these new moves go beyond the hollow cosmetic, tied as they are to political self-preservation. Newsom came under fire last November for sweeping the San Francisco streets of homeless encampments and blight just before the arrival of Chinese President Xi JinPing, making clear that aggressive action, even if it was just a shallow PR scramble, was possible. These problems aren’t unique to this American microcosm alone, but a survey through this focused prism, city to city, might help to formulate and implement unique and yet remarkably universal solutions.

In Lansing, Jerry Norris might not be the first man on the scene to erase or paint over the many “ACAB'' tags scribbled and painted across the Fledge’s walls, which feature colorful and often hard-edged murals and artworks from various community members and friends. Like cave drawings of old, they depict life in Lansing, Michigan, for better and worse. Radiical Systems is interested in the Fledge precisely because it’s interested in preventing the ongoing collateral damage created by the degradation or dearth of positive human values within interrelated institutional structures.

Where lucky citizens in Lansing might point to or lean on the nearby Michigan State University as a consistent employer (over 10k employees), or the State Government (almost 14k), or the Lansing Police Department (roughly 200 sworn officers), many Lansing residents are left scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s next, let alone what’s available, beyond roles in health care and auto-adjacent industries like insurance or maintenance. Sparrow Health systems and E.W. Sparrow Hospital, for instance, jointly accounts for roughly 9,000 jobs, but who has access to these facilities and services, meaning, who can actually afford it and who are their employees actually serving? It should follow that health care, often purchased through employee buy-in packages (57% in 2023), is often utilized in a reactionary manner, as opposed to dealing with the root causes of personal and civic ills, which are often intertwined, like drinking water from the tap in Flint, MI, among other enduring examples. Can the psychological, let alone physical effects of toxic drinking drinking water ever be accurately quantified?

Those who were knocked off the American dream’s path or simply come up empty for answers, often turn to dangerous or degrading outlets, usually as an escape of some kind. The Fledge exists (without judgement) to field, harbor, embrace, protect, nurture and inspire these people, often trapped or lost in what’s becoming a systemic American purgatory of narcotics, gun violence, sex work, and general post-industrial, post-late-stage-capitalistic despair. Yes, there are people working. Similarly, the entire town or state need not be painted with this brush. Out of slightly more than 112,000 people, the latest population of Lansing, MI, General Motors employs, and this is a generous assessment, roughly 4,500 individuals. Current (2024) data shows the Lansing-East Lansing, MI unemployment rate at 3.70%, compared to 3.10% last month and 5.00% last year. The pandemic surely influenced these shifting percentages, as fortunate-enough stores and businesses eventually reopened and the furloughed returned to work that’s actually measurable by agencies like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The humans behind the statistical “employed” are folks still on the grid; still in the game or race; still trying on the old fashioned “real jobs;” the endangered “9-5” way. Prior case studies, increasing articles and segments in the press, and various social media posts by Americans have all expressed that a full time job doesn’t ensure that all bills are paid, needs are met, or safety and resources secured. Jerry Norris is interested in how to catch, Holden Caulfield-style, those who have already gone over the edge and survived, as well as those rapidly approaching it; those who have or feel like giving up; those simply in need of a safe place to go, to crash, to create, to perform, to find crucial goods and services, or simply to find something positive to hold on to.

“It comes down to basic needs at the end of the day,” Mr. Norris explains (Jerry, more naturally from here). “If you go into Maslow’s Hierarchy (see: case study 2)-safety and security, food and shelter, connection, self esteem and actualization, when you’re missing those first two in your whole community, when you look at the individual, 65% of the people around us in Lansing live below the ALICE threshold and asset limit, which means income constrained and under-employed. Of the six basic needs: health care, housing, child care, food, technology and transportation, every paycheck, they have to decide what they're going to sacrifice. They have to eliminate a basic need. Not a desire, not a want, not entertainment. So what do they do? The first and easiest to neglect is health care. They quit going to the doctor. It costs too much or it’s bad news or it’s ‘They treat me like shit.’ ”

Jerry Norris’ take on “radical inclusion” means a radically laissez-faire approach to lifestyle and hospitality. “It’s even more powerful if I don’t like you,” Jerry explains, “as it affirms my belief that every person should have a right to self-actualization.” The Fledge remains interested in interrogating the enduring relevance of different systems as well, from gang activity and affiliation, to the nature of available currencies and their economic structures, to local and international notions of brotherly love as it connects to policing. Once more, the local “church” on the corner has evolved into something new, effective, and clearly necessary. For Jerry, it is a space where personal safety and individual, inalienable human sovereignty are held, not only in equal regard, but consistently and generously reinforced as positively co-dependent.

The Fledge operates at the corner of Eureka Street and S Holmes Street on about an eighth of an acre in a largely suburban-residential section of Michigan’s state capital with very “urban” problems. There’s a chicken coop on the S Holmes side and a community garden filled with herbs and spices on Eureka, with plans to approve a small greenhouse by the summer. The 12,000 square foot building was built in 1926 by the Church of Christ. In 1960 it became the Church of the Nazarene. “Then we bought it in 2018,” Jerry explains once inside, offering up that he did have a “eureka” moment when he first laid eyes on the space back in March 2018. “It played into the first day we saw this building,” he says of the street name. “I was just a few steps into the entranceway and made the offer to the real estate agent. People thought I was crazy.”

Through a doorway adjacent to a basement couch clearly fated for crashing is a music production and recording studio which is free and open to the public, with the gentle caveat that users or members of the Fledge return something of value (a volunteered good or service) at some future date. Jerry, an early crypto enthusiast, created Fledge Coin (FLDG), which members can earn by performing various positive actions within the Fledge or by completing “quests” (Bounties) in the community. FLDG can be used for specific on and off-site privileges, like preferred access to the recording studio when it’s over-booked, or to acquire merch, art, or “drip” from community members. Jerry emphasizes that FLDG is not an investment tool, but rather “a way for us to track timebank-type work and bartering that is happening already.”

The door on the opposite side of the basement common room leads to what feels like a hoarder’s storage area, though the space is courageously organized (there’s a method to the madness). Pockets of this room feature tools and materials for screen printing, another area for small-scale farming and gardening and a stretch of desktop computers replete with vintage wired mouses and solid Internet. There’s a neighborhood-fueled library, a kit for a homemade apiary beside wire for the chicken coop, a studio with tools for 3D printing which hosts various classes and workshops, and much more. Each quadrant is a pathway to an undiscovered talent or area of interest. These in-turn morph into “merchant services” at the Fledge, which operates as both a for-profit under The Fledge, LLC as well as a nonprofit with The Fledge Foundation. Like many foundations, this distinction involves funding and investment. The collective sum of these tools and services are integrated into a cycle-breaking workforce development program.

At a very Arthurian round table in the basement common area, Jerry’s eyes turn to the couch. One can see and feel the gravitational impression of the countless bodies of various ages and races who’ve found sanctuary, if only for one crucial night, on this beat-up but cozy piece of old furniture. Jerry has witnessed sex workers, addicts and gang members wake up to their “true” selves, however fleeting that can be sometimes. Self-actualization can mean sleeping off the trauma-built exo-skeleton, which, though intangible, often waits beside the couch like sneakers.

“That phenomenon is frequent,” Jerry says. “It is across all demographics. It’s not just the kid, it could be a female or male in a domestic violence situation. Their house is just so horrible that they’d rather sleep on this couch. The last time this happened was yesterday.” Jerry, having his own aforementioned “armor,” which can certainly come in handy, has to be sensitive about the notion of a teenager or adult putting their armor back on after decompressing at the Fledge. “I can’t say, ‘Go out there without your armor.’ That would be irresponsible of me. As they’re gearing up to face that again, we don’t talk that much about it. It’s just, ‘Alright, I know you’re soldiering up. It’s ok. You’re gonna be alright.’ It’s the constant pressure of the threat of violence. When you’re dealing with urban problems, with kids growing up with guns just being a thing, that pressure creates that fear and puts you on guard and it starts popping in your head.” Jerry notes here that the male brain doesn't fully develop until one’s late twenties, adding further, "If you're fifteen and carrying a gun, with all of that anxiety; what that does to you; how do you ever come back to a baseline of calm and peace with that level of fear when you have a psychological bullet in the chamber for most of your waking life?”

Jerry owns a gun but he doesn’t enjoy that fact. He hates it. Jerry has found himself scrambling for this very gun, though he’s never had to use it. “The most recent time I brandished my gun was in the building and that was about eleven days ago,” he offered at the time of the interview. The Fledge often hosts rap and hip-hop concerts. Jerry sometimes jokes, with an unapologetic air of truth, that seeing too many white people in a room makes him nervous. Venues across certain cities in Michigan, Jerry explained, are often afraid to host evenings of music that may or may not come with participants involved in gang activity or musical content that features posturing or peacocking about said activity. Things can get spicy and often do. Jerry just happens to have a Carolina Reaper-level spice tolerance. For these events, Jerry will use security and employ metal detecting wands at the door, though he does this rarely and usually at the request of promoters. He also doesn’t allow or appreciate gaslighting from police, though their presence is welcome if they don’t needlessly posture or intimidate.

“A lot of this is just scare tactics,” Jerry says, speaking to what level of danger or fear is rational either in the Fledge itself or just outside its doors. “There’s a lot of showing off and puffling yourself up like a puffer fish when you’re out on the street like that. And I've just seen so many young men, you know, 15, 16, 17-years-old who you’d be scared to death of out on the street, but when you sit them on the couch here and we start talking, they turn back into the young person that they are. I can see that in every one of these men and women who are out here acting tough or being desperate, that there’s the human being in there. There’s somebody’s daughter, sister, son, and I see that person so often. If I’m respectful to them, if I show respect, trust and kindness to them and maybe even turn and puff up my chest too sometimes, then I earn that respect.”

Jerry has Native American ancestry (The Ojibwe call themselves Anishinabe as Jerry identifies [or Anishinaubag or Neshnabek], which means "original men."). It can be seen across his face and felt in his vibe and actions, especially as it relates to his stewardship of the land and responsibility to the community. “These Great Lakes, these forests, these hills, the Upper Peninsula-this is my land and I know that,'' Jerry adds passionately. “I know it here (points to his heart).” Jerry speaks frequently about the privilege of being “racially ambiguous” as he says. He is also aware of his ability-his privilege, perhaps-to pass as white. This makes him “an expert at code-switching,” which he claims he doesn’t do flippantly. It simply makes him an effective communicator or liaison between the police and those who may consider them to be predatory antagonists. “We’re different in so many ways because a lot of organizations just expect respect and it becomes a nebulous term that nobody understands,” he adds. “Some of these people that other people are scared of, their babies might be getting food from here, their mom might be getting food from here, and there’s a certain amount of loyalty with that.”

During the sit-down interview, Jerry had various community members and allies of the Fledge engaged in different social service initiatives upstairs. At 12-5pm on weekdays, residents of Lansing who may or may not engage in sex work can come in to procure various forms of contraception and find low-pressure daytime sanctuary. Unhoused young people, usually ousted or alienated from their childhood homes after coming out as gay or trans, are directed towards available resources. Students of Michigan State University on a path towards a social services or psychology degree, work with on-site licensed social workers to learn real skills and provide immediate and ongoing help to the living, breathing human neighbors who desperately need it.

“It’s an old wives tale or urban legend that I am affiliated with the Bloods and they protect us," Jerry says. “That’s not true. Having said that, there are some older gentlemen that I work with that are Bloods or ex-Bloods and they do protect me. They do understand what I’m doing. I don't wanna say that they show up with guns and they're ready to fight for me like that, but they do protect me.”

Where some folks, especially those with means, seem to be retreating from society-this at its most extreme looks like billionaires building bunkers-Jerry is intentionally, happily exposed and available to his community. He’s had some scary moments, from gang-related threats including various close call drivebys, to all sorts of break-ins. Sometimes this is just entitled neighborhood kids looking for a place to party late, and though this frustrates him, it doesn’t deter him. “There was a shooting around 12 days ago, an hour after our event, the same event where I had to get the gun out,” Jerry recalls. “They had an after-party close by where there was a shooting. I’m the only one in this city right now saying, ‘What could I have done differently?’ There’s only two people who feel bad about it, I can almost guarantee it. It’s me and the shooter. Maybe the guys that were shot. Because the shooter doesn't feel good about shooting somebody. I don't care what anyone says. It’s a really high outlier to have somebody that’s so sociopathic that they don't care. Most of these kids that have shot somebody are full of deep regret and pain.”

Jerry sometimes works with Advance Peace, an organization founded in 2010 that sets up street teams that intervene on gun violence. It provides cash stipends to citizens who feel that gun violence, especially connected to theft, is the likely or even the only answer. “It was created by a guy from Lansing but lives near Oakland (DeVone Boggan runs Advance Peace out of Richmond, CA). Very successful out there. My friend and ally in the Fledge, Michael Lynn, not the most loved person in the city (Flynn, who identifies as Black, sued the Lansing Fire Department, where he worked as a firefighter since 2014, over years of racial discrimination and harassment. He was awarded $1 million in 2022 after a five day trial in the U.S. District Court in Kalamazoo.)-he’s very outspoken-but they really brought Advanced Peace to Lansing.” Jerry says he has his own street team, however informal, despite some “air quote” innuendo and bouncing eyebrows, his tone is quite serious. “I have them trying to find out who was responsible for the shooting 11 days ago. It’s weird. I should know by now. It’s at a point in my head that it was a complete outsider to the community.”

Our 2024 Radiical Systems in person interview with Jerry Norris at the Fledge happened on the exact one-year anniversary of the mass shooting at nearby Michigan State University (February 13th, 2023), which is located in East Lansing. Eight people were shot on that day with three being killed. Five were injured. The shooting was carried out by a 43-year-old Black man with multiple gun offenses and zero known connections to the campus or institution. NBC News reported the day after the shooting that the gunman’s father felt his son had anger issues, especially after the death of his mother in 2020, admitting the future gunman became reclusive, socially isolated, and "started to get evil and mean…he didn't care about anything anymore." The shooter’s father further described his son as "evil angry."

“When you’re in fight or flight like that, those chemical reactions that are happening-adrenaline, endorphins, cortisol, dopamine-it shifts the brain chemically,” Jerry says, initially referencing that very real and hypothetical human teen staring down the harsh realities of gang life. “It’s your nose; once you smell something for so long you don’t smell it anymore. It's numbness. The mental illness we have from people in this space as they get older is very attributable to what you’re talking about. When we started killing the mental health services…,” Jerry trails off here, leans back, choked with what seems like a wider frustration, but one flirting with some sort of personal failing, rational or not. “We’re at the one year anniversary of MSU mass murder shootings. The person that did that, someone like him comes here everyday. They don't have their basic needs met. They’re disenfranchised. They’ve been in and out of jail and every time they cycle through that or some similar experience, they see more enemies until they have access to a gun. (The shooter, who had a record and past gun offenses, swerved Michigan background checks by buying a gun at an unregulated, out of state gun show. As of this writing, the Justice Department finalized rules to close a loophole that allowed people to sell guns online, at gun shows and at other informal venues without conducting background checks on those who purchase them.) Their hope is dead and they're going to take people down with them and pay those people back for what they did. There are thousands of people like this waiting to be a mass shooter.”

Jerry Norris confirms he was born in Lansing in 1966. “It’s usually how I start the story,” he quips. His brother followed in 1968 and his parents divorced almost immediately after he was born. Jerry’s mother was 17 when she had baby Jerry. Her pregnancy resulted in her getting kicked out of school, forcing her to scramble into another. She did her best for a while. Jerry’s young father was at Northern Michigan University on a hockey scholarship, “But he was really wrestling for them, so he had to drop out of school. It wasn’t set up to succeed right from the beginning.” When Jerry’s parents got divorced, it created the proverbial, statistical single mother. “A single mother, since the ‘60s in Lansing, Michigan has a 50% chance of living in poverty,” Jerry explains. “So I grew up in poverty. I live a block and a half from the hospital where I was born and work a block and a half away from the high school where I graduated. I’m Midwest; as white trash as you can get, but I’m a multi-million-miler on Delta. I’ve been to Dubai 98 times; been to Amsterdam 180 times; I’ve been all over the Middle East; all over Southeast Asia; all over Europe. Only two states I’ve never been to, Hawaii and Maine. I’m very lucky.”

Jerry stresses with importance that he did have a father in his life, “...an every other weekend type of thing.” Dad later worked for the Department of Transportation with a focus on real estate. Though born in 1966, Jerry remembers the Detroit riots in ‘69 and the aura and climate of civil rights. Being raised by a single mother working in “the industry,” mostly bartending and later, at her own catering company, Jerry rarely saw her. “She’s working when I’m home and I’m at school when she has time to do anything. All those things. So you end up with the aunt, but she’s 16 and a hippy and smokin’ weed all the time and drivin’ around and the cops pull up behind you and now you have a traumatic response about seeing the police. I think when I counted I had eight seriously adverse childhood experiences. That’s supposed to fuck you up pretty bad. But my dad did something that really set the path for me. When I was six-years-old, in ‘72 or ‘73, he said, “I’m going to teach you guys (Jerry and his brother) how to wrestle and you’re gonna be so good at wrestling you’re gonna get a scholarship to college and when you get there you’re gonna study computer science. I had my mission.”

Young Jerry was good (“I whooped everyone.”). He became addicted to winning. Winning means traveling out of town for stiffer competition. “That’s super-important to have when you’re younger because you start to see that there’s other people. They have the same problems, different resources, blah, blah, blah.” Jerry eventually graduated from the local high school in 1984, then headed to the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) to wrestle. He majored in computer science as his father recommended, but later switched to math. “In ‘84, you’re using Pascal and C and Fortran, Cobol, and you’re mostly working on sorting problems, like, ‘How can you find data faster?’ Now computer science is how to use ChatGBT to write your code for you.”

The coding languages kept changing, but the math was the math. He fell in love with probability theory. By his junior year, Jerry, who had displayed a savant-level dexterity, launched Jadian Consulting, his own firm. “I was working with the Institute for Social Research (ISR), a school for social work basically (out of Michigan University). I would be assigned to help researchers with their statistics. I would do a lot of studies. I was very lucky to do that.”

Despite everything he had persevered through up to that point, while pursuing his dream of competing against other varsity D1 all-American savages across the Midwest and others around the country, often with similar Olympic dreams, by his junior year, Jerry had already been molested on multiple occasions by the Michigan University physician, Dr. Robert E. Anderson, who worked in various capacities at the University between 1966 and 2003. The executive summary of an independent investigative report executed by the law firm WilmerHale, financed but not in any way influenced by a newly cooperative Michigan University a decade after Dr. Anderson’s death in 2008, opens as such:

On July 18, 2018, Thomas “Tad” DeLuca sent a letter to University of Michigan Athletic Director Warde Manuel. In his letter, Mr. DeLuca, an alumnus of the University and a member of the wrestling team in the 1970s, described a series of interactions with a former University physician, Robert E. Anderson. Mr. DeLuca wrote that, beginning in 1972, he sought treatment from Dr. Anderson for cold sores on his face and that, during several visits, Dr. Anderson examined his penis, did a hernia check, and conducted a digital rectal examination without explaining why such examinations were necessary. Mr. DeLuca also stated that he sought treatment from Dr. Anderson in 1974 for a dislocated elbow and that, once again, Dr. Anderson performed penis, hernia, and prostate examinations, all without any explanation or apparent justification. According to Mr. DeLuca, these types of examinations were standard operating procedure for “Dr. ‘Drop Your Drawers’ Anderson.”

The University of Michigan first hired Dr. Anderson in 1966 as an associate physician at University Health Service (“UHS”), which is the University’s on-campus medical clinic. In ‘68, the year Jerry’s brother was born, Dr. Anderson was promoted to UHS Director, a position he held for the next twelve years. Dr. Anderson eventually served as team physician in the Athletic Department, a clinical instructor at the University’s Medical School, and a lecturer in the Department of Medical Care Organization at the School of Public Health. Dr. Anderson resigned as UHS Director in 1980, but remained at UHS as a senior physician until July 1981 when he transferred to the Athletic Department. Dr. Anderson continued to serve as a physician in the Athletic Department until 1999, despite multiple formal accusations reaching the administration.

Over the course of his thirty-seven years as a University employee, Dr. Anderson engaged in sexual misconduct with patients on countless occasions, usually in quid pro quo arrangements in which he provided medical services in exchange for sexual favors. He seemed to target and even blackmail the campus’ LGBTQ community primarily. The WilmerHale report chronicles the University’s failure on multiple occasions to properly address a litany of rumors and many valid accusations, let alone remove Dr. Anderson from public life, or at least the University campus.

“In late 1978 or 1979, Jim Toy, the Gay Male Advocate in the University’s Human Sexuality Office, told Thomas Easthope, who was then the Assistant Vice President of Student Services with oversight responsibility for UHS, that Dr. Anderson was ‘fooling around with boys’ at UHS,” the report states in its How the University Responded section. Despite having heard about Dr. Anderson’s misconduct, Easthope, who lied about firing and confronting Dr. Anderson (he did neither) instead “...signed documentation related to Dr. Anderson’s continued employment at UHS in January 1980 and approved a salary increase for him in or around August 1980.”

“I kinda took a break from wrestling,” Jerry says, leaning back again in his chair. Again, forlorn and frustrated. The fist of his right hand gently pounds the table twice. He sighs, leans back in, “I’ve got scholarship money here so I gotta be careful. I got more jobs so I’m making more money from my consulting company, so I decide, Fuck that guy, I wanna wrestle.” After a difficult hiatus, which meant forfeiting his scholarship indefinitely, Jerry later returned as a “walk on.” He never told his coach about the abuse. Similarly to the aforementioned Mr. DeLuca, though wildly damaging and malevolent, Dr. Anderson or “Handy Andy,” “Goldfinger,” “Dr. Handerson,” and other nicknames, was relegated to a toxic, rolling joke or a pernicious, haunting meme.

“There were 1,050 of us that that happened to and it took us 40 years to come out about it,” Jerry says. “I think about the young child in some bedroom somewhere with some jackass step dad. Who’s protecting him? If it took a thousand of us to speak out, who speaks out for that kid?”

The report’s Findings section concludes with a salient message, late as it is: “Dr. Anderson’s misconduct prompted some student athletes to quit their teams; it caused some students to question their sexuality; it caused some students to seek counseling; it affected some students’ academics, including some who left the University; and it undoubtedly affected other students in myriad ways. The trauma that Dr. Anderson’s misconduct caused persists to this day.”

“It all happened with (Larry) Nasser at MSU, just three miles down the street from here and I know a ton of those young ladies,” Jerry says. Jerry agreed to participate in multiple surveys and studies regarding this sort of abuse, which, specifically in regard to Dr. Anderson, included a web of harassment and assault. Dr. Larry Nasser, a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, similarly abused over 150 women over the course of two decades in a sanctioned examination room often populated with other MSU staff, a stone’s throw from where Jerry now lives and works.

A September, 2018 article in The Atlantic titled “The Moral Catastrophe at Michigan State” about the University’s handling of Nasser, provided this summary: “Long before the allegations against Nassar went public, multiple victims described their abuse-how Nassar touched their genitalia during physical-therapy sessions-to MSU coaches, therapists, and administrators. They were told not to worry, that what they’d experienced was “actual medical treatment.” A 2014 investigation into Nassar, conducted by MSU’s Title IX office, found no evidence of misconduct. He was allowed to continue working for the university, treating students on campus until 2016, when two of his former patients filed additional accusations against him.”

Information regarding the investigation, conviction, and federal and state sentencing of Nasser can be found on the MSU website. The obvious point here is that two of Michigan’s biggest universities, these storied institutions of higher learning, hired, harbored, enabled and protected serial rapists, pedophiles and abusers of young, talented, promising men and women for years.

“Anyways, I’m back in the throw of it,” Jerry says of returning to the Wolverine’s wrestling team, despite Dr. Anderson’s enduring presence. “But I have to go up two weight classes to make the team so I can be their 142 pounder. Can’t be 134 or 126. My natural weight was 172 and I was going down to 126. I just started going up until I could beat someone and that usually doesn’t happen, especially in Big 10, D-1, which is filled with three or four-time state champions training for the Olympics.” Now Jerry was the one getting whooped on the mat. “I’m just a guy out there doing his best,” he says. “At least I could beat the guy that wanted the job too.” In the Big 10 tournament, Jerry found momentum. He was starting to win again. “I’m beating the guy from Wisconsin. Dave Schultz, if you’ve ever seen Foxcatcher (the 2014 film depicts the wealthy wrestling enthusiast John du Pont and his 1986 recruitment and eventual murder of Schultz), he was coaching against me. My ankle collapses when I’m trying to do a particular move on the guy, Jim Jordan’s teammate. I’ve hated that fucker since I met him when I was 16 (Mr. Jordan is a fiery Republican House Representative from Ohio, and yes, remarkably, a two-time NCAA national champion wrestler at the University of Wisconsin–Madison). He’s a dick.”

Jim Jordan-and this is where things start to get uncanny-was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University from 1987 to 1995 while their own team physician, Dr. Richard Strauss, started engaging in sexual abuse with students. In April, 2018, Ohio State University began an independent investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Dr. Strauss, hiring their own firm, also at great expense. That report concluded that “Strauss had committed sexual abuse against 177 student-patients. The majority of abuse (143 victims) was categorized as genital fondling associated with medically unnecessary genital or rectal examinations. Of the 177, 153 were student-athletes, of which a plurality (48) were members of the men's wrestling team.”

“So my ankle collapses during the match,” Jerry continues. “I’m in the worst pain of my life. I’m up by four points and my coach throws in the towel. It ended my career. I could not wrestle anymore. I couldn't run. I couldn’t do a lot of things. So I just focused on graduating.” So Jerry graduated with a degree in statistics and an emphasis on computer science, philosophy and psychology. With his humble but successful consulting company still up and running, Jerry went to work for the global technology solutions company, Unisys, right after graduating. “I had a girlfriend I got pregnant,” Jerry says. “Not my current wife today, but my daughter Daniella was born in 1988. It also wasn’t set up to succeed though. Neither one of us wanted this, so we never got married. We separated quickly and I became that every other weekend dad.”

Jerry established himself as a rockstar at Unisys early and would eventually blast through into an executive role. His first mentor, a hard-nosed NASA engineer in the ‘60s who claimed to have his name inscribed on equipment left on the moon, taught him about quality engineering. He later introduced Jerry to the ISO 9000, plunking the original document down on his desk with a thud. “This is in 1989 and I know a lot of people might not know what that is,” Jerry says, “but it’s the first standard ever written by the International Organization of Standardization that dealt with a system rather than a specific specification for a part. So they created this quality system.”

Jerry got certified as an auditor while becoming increasingly obsessed with systems-their health, efficacy, their safety protocols. He studied the ISO 9000 and helped fuel its evolution. His philosophy for auditing, which he settled on after hundreds of audits over the years, correlates directly with his current thoughts on policing. “You walk into a place and they have quality problems everywhere,” Jerry says, still from the round table. “The first thing they do is send in inspectors. They're trying to inspect quality into the fabric of the product, but you can’t. You can just sort it at that point. A lot of problems escape through. If you take all of those inspectors away without warning, the quality always immediately improves, because it’s not that guy’s responsibility, it’s my responsibility as the operator of the injection molding machine, or whatever. Just like quality assurance in the ‘80s, public safety is now free. There’s nobody better to solve gun violence problems than the people immersed in it and participating in it. But we don’t give them that courtesy, respect and freedom, and then the old white lady down the street who peeks through her curtains, she needs those police just like she needs Jesus and all the comforts in her life that make her feel safe. It’s an illusion.”

“Seeing math,” as Jerry believably says he does, helps one to quickly see where things don’t add up. Jerry says that almost every plant he visited while at Unisys saw improvements in quality, which usually led to more hiring. “I would go from Dubai to Alaska, then I’d be in Santa Cruz with a hotel and rental then fly to San Diego and not even turn those rentals in cause I was gonna be right back. I was all over the place traveling like that.”

Years passed and suddenly huge mainframe computers were not selling like they used to. “They showed up and took my boss’ boss, the director of the department, out with boxes. He worked there for 40 years. He was crying. I came in the next day and resigned. They asked, ‘Where are you going to work?’ I said, ‘Daniella’s in Grand Rapids, I’m going there to find a job.’ ”

Jerry’s ex, the mother of his daughter, eventually married another man. He says they became very religious. “The baby daddy is not a friend, and in this instance, I’m the baby daddy. He hated me. Lots of obstacles. I just took it because the mission was to be with my daughter.” Jerry says he and Daniella were best friends and that she wanted to hang out with her biological father, “desperately, constantly,” but an increasingly dogmatic firewall was being constructed to keep him out. Traveling so much for work, even locally, didn’t help. “I would drive from Ann Arbor to Grand Rapids, pick her up, and then stop back in Lansing. I was also living in Ann Arbor, Ypsi (short for Ypsilanti, MI) for a while; Plymouth, then Downtown Detroit.” At Unisys, he won the highest award in the organization, the Unysis Quality Champion award. Resigning meant missing out on a major bonus that came with it. He was hired within two weeks by a company called Cascade Engineering. “Sort of famous in the space,” he says, “and well known in the automotive and injection molding industry. They had a zero quality rating at Denso in six-months. Chrysler, Ford and General Motors followed.” Jerry was effective because he understood workers on the floor can't stand suits imposing broad, useless safety nets without actual hands-on experience. So he watched closely, often rolling up his sleeves in order to feel the proper vibrations, smell the right smells, and hear the correct machine noises for himself. “The only person who can solve those problems is the operator.”

Jerry would go on to install over 200 custom systems and installations around the world including one to prevent heat stroke deaths on construction sites in Dubai for Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who was facing international criticism for unsafe conditions. Contractors would fall behind schedule and push their workers into the dangerous and illegal (since 1972) Noon-4pm window where midday temperatures can become deadly. “They had the Human Rights Watch on their back; they're getting boycotted and they're scared sanctions are coming and it’s because they are killing so much labor in the process of building up their city.” Jerry says they went from 600 deaths a year to five. He beat out several major firms to secure the Dubai contract, which initially came to him shortly after 9/11. He was married by then. His daughter with his new wife was two-years-old and his son was just four-months-old when the second plane hit. Jerry’s pitch, which he delivered in person while tensions were at a peak between Arab and Western nations, convinced Sheik Mohammed that doing things the humane way was actually cheaper. The math played out. They later collaborated on food safety, public safety, environmental protection, and import/export systems. “80% of the food in the Middle East comes into Dubai first and gets distributed. They add value because they test and inspect. They've been doing this for 2000 years with pearls and silk.”

Back in the United States, Jerry played a minor role in the writing of the National Organic Program, which cleaned up a lot of the misleading marketing and arbitrary cost premiums. “Every municipality (like Baltimore where Jerry designed many enduring food systems) had their own kind of standard, but nobody was doing this. I worked with California Certified Organic farmers out of Santa Cruz; I worked with QAI out of San Diego, Oregon Tilth, a ton of these certifiers. I later worked on what eventually became the Global Food Safety Initiative.”

By 2012, it was home for six weeks, Dubai for two weeks. Jerry was back and forth constantly. The trip was getting easier-a stop in Amsterdam for a beer and cigarette, get to Dubai by 6pm. “One time I had $9,500 and thought, ‘I’ll just claim it,’ and they put me through customs. They take me inside a room and just tear me apart. They look in every place I ever hid any money. You can not outsmart those guys. When I realized that, I was like, ‘I am never smuggling this money again.’ Then I was watching CNN. The first Bitcoin machine in the world is in Dubai.” Jerry looked for that particular Bitcoin ATM for two weeks, but never found it.

In 2014 his board at the consulting firm chose to sell the company. “Jadian Consulting still operates and has customers but I don’t track it,” Jerry says. He kept some intellectual property they didn’t know about, sold it, and started GAIA Solutions the next day. He emailed all his contacts. The International Organization of Standardization reached out. That led to the International Accreditation Forum hiring Jerry out of Sweden and Switzerland to build the global directory of all certificates in the world because they’re often counterfeited. “They fly me to Germany and shit like that. I took my son with me. It was awesome. While there I thought, ‘Why don’t I just try to build my system thing that I’ve been working on? I wanted an incubator that built autonomous systems that would carry on and be sustainable without me.”

Jerry started the Fledge virtually at first, with early meetings being held in a restaurant with a coding club for kids and adults. This was The Log Jam in Grand Ledge, MI. Out of this initial club, Jerry, along with the help of his son, launched a skateboarding brand, Yoor Mom Skates, an “incuskater” as he once called it. Jerry started winding down GAIA Solutions while being tasked by the city to spearhead economic acceleration initiatives after winning a grant based on a software protocol he developed. Things, generally, were going well.

“She dies in the bathroom,” he says at the round table. “Well, she nods out in the Quality Dairy- a public bathroom. I meet at the hospital and she’s on life support. I watch them prick under her nail with a pin. I had to watch them do all these tests; remove her breathing and see how her body reacts. I had to do all that because I had to pull the plug.” Jerry leans back again. “I realize that not only do I have to help with entrepreneurialism and helping people on the one side of the equation and get the revenue up so they can afford basic needs, but there’s a whole lot to do outside of that as well. If that place would have had Narcan, Daniella would be alive today.”

“When naloxone was first approved to reverse opioid overdoses, its brand name was “Narcan.” There are now other formulations and brand names for naloxone, but many people continue to call all of these products ‘Narcan,’ ” the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) website states.

“So I went and got certified in Narcan,” Jerry says. “I found a plug for it, Harm Reduction Michigan. I started giving it to everybody. Do that in a suburban community and see how queer they call you and all that. No fuckers, wait till you see. Your grandma with her broken hip is gonna get addicted to “Oxy” (OxyContin) and then you see who’s overdosing. I started showing these numbers, joined Families Against Narcotics and all that. Like I said upstairs, you don’t wake up and say you wanna do harm reduction, you get invited into it. Every mother and father with an addicted kid is a harm reduction specialist waiting to happen.”

In 2017, the night before his 51st birthday, Jerry got pulled over on the way to visit his son and got charged with a DUI. He had two, strong, 16oz beers with a good friend, ironically, Dark Horse Brewing Company’s IPA, “Smells Like a Safety Meeting.” Jerry blew a .081. “Right there on the edge. Zero tolerance.” He spent his birthday in jail. “I went in with no lawyer. No nothing.” Jerry says he got whooped by the judge, but they’re friends now. He had to get court-ordered cognitive behavioral therapy. “It’s what the kids with trauma and fight or flight need.”

Michigan State University started to catch on to what Jerry and the nascent Fledge was up to. With their research assistance, Jerry discovered 80% of the people coming to Grand Ledge, where the early Fledge operated, were coming from East Lansing. “Kids were pulling out of our parking lot and if they were Black or Brown they'd get pulled over, searched, and harassed,” Jerry says. The early location for the Fledge also experienced a break-in. Jerry had to contend with the police. “ ‘Yeah, this isn’t your responsibility,’ but then the cop flips off the camera and the mic and says, ‘I want to talk to you about something personal.’ He says, ‘I saw you at the Family Against Narcotics meeting the other night talking about how you took responsibility for your daughter. I loved your daughter. She used to come and talk to me about how horrible you were. She used to come to me and say, 'I wish you were my dad.’ He was telling me about my best friend, while I’m locked in a room. It was horrible. He was just trying to bash me down.”

Jerry’s wife, his son’s mother, had left Jerry a couple years before this incident. But it was this interaction with the cop, on the back of a terrible tragedy, that pushed Jerry over the edge. He was too wily, too cat-like, too connected to people who relied on him to vanish entirely, but he turned his back on a lot of his possessions, ignored debtors, and took a massive step away. “In 2017, I should say, we were probably the most impactful we ever were in Grand Ledge. There’s rationalization and making excuses. I still can’t see it as clearly as I want to. I know DUIs are not good, nor is owing money, but fuck Capital One to be honest.” Jerry found himself back in Lansing 20 years later. In 2018, Jerry officially moved the Fledge from Grand Ledge to Eureka Street. “I stood out on that porch on the first day and just started waving at people and they were like, ‘Fuck you and fuck you!’ And I’m like, ‘Hi!’ Today if I don't wave at them they're mad at me. We start conversations. ‘What is this place? What are you doing to my church?’ and shit like that. We’d say the studio is open, go look at that. Boom, boom, boom, every damn day.”

In 2018, Jerry invited Harm Reduction Michigan to the Fledge to premiere a documentary about Bevel Up, an organization out of Vancouver that helps educate drug users on safe injection practices. Jerry was on the panel with a few of their nurses. One nurse said there should be a Fledge in every city, so Jerry googled how many cities there are. “It’s like 10,020 or something,” he says. “So I put something together called 10,000 Fledges. That’s exactly what our goal is. It’s not a vision where we go buy 10,000 buildings. We share what we’ve done as an open source model, network with people, connect with them and try to get 10,000 organizations like us who we can learn from and they can learn from us.” It’s posited here that there are only so many changemakers out there like Jerry Norris, with so many unique skills who are willing, passionate and able to do what he does and live a life like he leads. “Oh, no. There’s 10,000 of me. Easy.”