Loss of father leads to foundation for kids
“This is what we do,” said Norman Yatooma, handing 10 $100 bills to Teresa Stanley and Glorius Blanch Monday. “We try to do anything we possibly can for the widow or widower who are left behind.”
Yatooma is very familiar with the pain and confusion Stanley and Blanch are experiencing a month after 22-year-old Martinez Blanch was shot to death in Detroit. Yatooma experienced the same feelings in 1993 as a 20-year-old college student.
He was away at school in Indiana, when he received word that his father, Manuel, had been murdered, shot twice in the head while interrupting a carjacking in Detroit.
The oldest of four sons, he found himself feeling he was now father to his three brothers – Jeff, 14, Greg, 13, and Christopher, 11 – and his mother’s defender. But he also felt ill-equipped to fill his father’s shoes.
His father had insisted on “raising up men of strength and character,” and according to Yatooma, “he taught us every bit as much about being men of strength and character in his death as he had during his lifetime.”
According to “Norman’s Story” which appears on the For The Kids Foundation Web site, 63 claims were filed against Manuel Yatooma’s estate and what creditors and litigants didn’t take was spent on lawyer fees.
His father had been successful at virtually everything he touched, but that financial security evaporated into “monetary chaos ; threatened bankruptcy and foreclosure.” Yatooma eked out what he could of his student loans and worked side jobs to feed the family.
“It was incredibly hard to get through,” he said. “We were threatened with foreclosure five-six times. We got robbed blind. It was the most incredible thing to live through and played a role in defining me and my family.”
Yatooma is now a successful attorney with his own law firm. His brother, Jeff, is a successful businessman. Greg is in law school with plans of changing his brother’s law firm from Yatooma and Associates to Yatooma and Yatooma. And Christopher is running a prosperous business.
It took nearly 10 years to close his father’s estate, and even today, there are still some lingering legal battles.
And it took half that time to create the For The Kids Foundation. Launched on Father’s Day 2003, it is dedicated “in honor and loving memory” of his father. In a little over a year, the foundation has been able to help 12 families touched by tragedy.
The foundation provides services to the children who have lost a parent and their families with direct financial support, as well as professional grief counseling, legal services, accounting services, job placement, scholarships, tutoring, vocational training, mentoring and even household services, among other things.
“No other charity has tailored their assistance to this specific group of children, children who hugged their parents one day and had to bury them the next,” Yatooma wrote in Norman’s Story. “When I lost my father, there was no organization like For the Kids Foundation to provide the much-needed support. But now, with the help of donors, For the Kids Foundation can step in to assist those trying to reassemble their lives in the wake of a similar family tragedy.”
The foundation’s mission is to “bring tenderness to tragedy and turn tragedy to triumph for the families of kids who have lost a parent, by providing practical, professional and personal assistance at each stage of the grieving and recovery process.”
“We’re able to do what we do because of the giving of time and ability,” said Yatooma. “The board volunteers its time. We don’t pay them anything. And actually everything we fund-raise goes to the families.”
To find out more about the Birmingham-based For The Kids Foundation, to read Norman’s Story or request help, visit the foundation’s Web site at www.forthekidsfoundation.org.
smason@oe.homecomm.net / (734)953.2112
