October 19, 2025
The Fathers & Families Support Center works to restore the dignity of Black men, who are often dehumanized.
Founded in 1997 by the late Halbert Sullivan, the Fathers & Families Support Center (FFSC) in St. Louis began as a program to help absent fathers become active, nurturing parents. Over the decades, the organization has evolved with the times—expanding its reach to include leadership development, employment assistance, mentoring, and trauma-informed care—while staying true to its original mission of strengthening families and communities.
As Lucy Grimshaw, an FFSC social services case manager, noted in what is functionally a hybrid of op-ed and original reporting for Prism Reports, one of the center’s main goals is to keep the Black men who come to the center seeking support from falling through the cracks into either homelessness or the legal system, both of which can devour them whole.
As Chaz Harris, one of the men who utilizes the center’s resources, told Grimshaw, what the center offers Black men like him is unique.
“I needed to learn certain things. I needed to be quieter and see other people going through what I was going through. I felt like I was the only one. [FFSC makes] sure that we know that we are still human beings and deserve respect,” Harris said.
St. Louis, as Grimshaw notes, often does not extend that same courtesy to Black men. Tying together the experiences of Dred Scott and the 1857 Supreme Court ruling that bears his name, the Dred Scott decision, and the 2014 murder of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Grimshaw weaves together a narrative of Black men in St. Louis being repeatedly violated by the state and rendered in the overarching national imagination as beasts without families or connections.
As Grimshaw notes, “The distance between the man and the media is where policy, prosecution, and public perceptions take shape. These divides are not accidental or new.”
This, according to Grimshaw, allows the center to serve as a place where Black men can come and be treated like they matter, even as they attempt to rebuild their lives and their relationships with their children.
This extends to alumni of the center, men like Charles Barnes Jr., Reginald Slaughter, and Greg Cooper, who once upon a time, utilized the center to help them get back on their feet and find more stability. Now, all three men fill important leadership and outreach roles at the center. This allows them to serve as examples for the men who utilize the center’s services as avatars for their own possibilities.
As Harris noted to the outlet, he wants his own son to know that “daddy was a fighter,” and that as a man, he does not have to bind himself to strict, outdated ideals of masculinity.
He wants his son to know that it’s okay for men to cry, to ask for help, and not always have the answers when dealing with hardships. This, Harris explained, is what it means to live a life of dignity. This, Harris indicated, “means I can walk with my head high.”
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