Praxis is an organization whose goal is to inspire, guide, and integrate the Christian faith into the education of young entrepreneurs to bring about cultural change. This summer, I had the opportunity to visit a Praxis gathering at Biola University in California. While at Praxis, I met an entrepreneur named Justin Stimpson who started a company called Fathering.me.
Justin Stimpson grew up in a single-family home, where he never had a father figure to guide him through life. After growing up in a fatherless home, he realized the important role that fathers play in a child’s life and the negative effects that a fatherless child often experiences.
People who grow up fatherless are twenty times more likely to be incarcerated, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twice as likely to commit suicide. In addition, eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes and ninety percent of all homeless and runaway children are fatherless. As a result, fatherlessness has become a serious epidemic in our country.
However, unlike many people, Justin understood the fatherless epidemic to a greater extent than most people and thus started a company in order to combat it. As research shows, fatherlessness is often rooted in unplanned pregnancies and many of the fathers of these children are just teenagers who are too afraid to raise a child due to inexperience. Also, many of them have never had a father of their own. To solve this problem, Justin started a website called fathering.me which acts as an online resource center and mentor networking site. The site acts as a robust, engaging, and relevant collective of valuable resources for young men, who want to learn how to be great dads and it provides a national network of local, well-trained, and committed mentors ready to walk alongside young men for a full-year on their journey throughout their unplanned pregnancy and into fatherhood.
What I liked about his idea was that Justin saw one of the world’s greatest needs and fulfilled it by recollecting his own past experience as a fatherless child and created a website that would encourage fathers to stay with their children and be the best fathers they can be. I believe this website will help battle the fatherless epidemic and bring joy back to so many families.
i think it’s a great idea in theory, but I wonder how effective this app really is. I feel like most apathetic father’s wouldn’t care enough to invest to be better.
It’s interesting that they chose an online approach to this problem. It does have the widest applicability and can be utilized effectively when in app form, but it seems like it would lose some of its effectiveness. People in this situation typically want to confide in someone they trust, so maybe a local support system for men would work better. It’s a difficult problem to tackle, and I respect that Stimpson wants to apply the connectivity of the world to it. Not many others have that desire, and in that sense fathering.me has hit upon a demographic that it could almost exclusively grow from.