School’s out for the summer, but DeAndre Gaston is not taking a day off from his mission.
“He’s hungry, and he has this vision and passion, and it really is going to take his support system and the people around him to get him there,” Christina Rodriguez, executive director of a nonprofit known as Mom’s House, said of Gaston when he opened up his gym, Go Tyme Grynd, about a year ago.
Since then, Gaston has been busy making plans to change Toledo and give back to the community that supported him in getting on his feet.
In August, 2005, Gaston, 18 at the time, committed aggravated robbery and felonious assault when he and another man tried to rob a bar and ended up shooting a woman who impeded the robbery. Gaston served 16 years in prison for the incident.
Now Gaston is not only running a successful business, but he’s also trying to make a positive impact on children from the same neighborhoods in which he grew up.
“For the immediate need, what we are doing is we are keeping the kids occupied with something positive, something constructive,” Gaston said Tuesday. “But the real impact of the program is for the health of the community.”
At Jamie Farr Park in North Toledo, 40 children played until Gaston began motivating them with activities.
“You know, a lot of times the alternatives to gun violence is sitting somewhere, still, immobile, listening to someone speak, but this gives them an outlet,” said Aretha Allen, Gaston’s mother and administrative helper for the program. “They can relieve stress and energy.”
And after a few introductory remarks, the children were ready to move in the sunlight.
When asked what was on the agenda for the first day of the six-week program, Gaston replied. “It’s tests. It’s all about tests.
“We gotta learn who we are dealing with,” he said.
With a grant from the city of Toledo, Gaston and his team put together a curriculum to educate the children on nutrition, fitness, and muscle groups and to help them define goals they want to accomplish in the future.
“Once kids and adults understand the importance of fitness and health, they’ll understand how much it plays a part in their mental [health],” Paul Wyse, a certified trainer who works his own business, Wyse Choice Fitness, out of Go Tyme Grynd, said of the program.
This is the second year Gaston has put together the free Go Tyme Grynd Summer Youth Fitness Program, and he hopes it will reap benefits, especially for kids in central Toledo.
“That’s where you find most of the shootings, that’s where you find most of the health ailments,“ Gaston said. ”That’s where you find most of the concentrated poverty, in those five ZIP codes [06, 07, 08, 09, and 43610], and that’s where the majority of our kids come from.
“That’s what we’re happy about,” he said of the ability to help those youths.
Children aged 6 to 17 had their performance measured in running, long jump, push-ups, planks, and sit-ups, and each volunteer or coach wrote down how well the children did to document their performance for later comparison.
“So we started the kids off in a culture of fitness,” Gaston said. “So we don’t just want them to run around.
“We want them understanding why they are doing what they are doing and getting tools to prolong these practices and turn them into habits, lifestyle, lifelong habits,” he said.
These habits, Gaston believes, will change lives, especially when children learn them at a young age.
“One of his mottos is that physical fitness is directly intertwined with mental fitness,” De’Elegent Gaston, Gaston’s sister, said during the program.
A mother and owner of Glass City Childcare, Lakeila Carter, brought 12 of the children she watches in daycare to the program. She believes in the benefit for the children.
“A lot of these kids, they don’t get to do this type of stuff,” she said.
“It’s keeping them [the kids] active,” she said, and it “keeps them safe.”
First Published June 20, 2023, 11:50 p.m.
