Tony Hopson Retires As CEO Of SEI as Alum Trent Aldridge Steps Up

In the late 80s, Aldridge was one of those boys at the week-long summer basketball camp SEI president Tony Hopson founded.

“I was just blown away by the fact that it was just all of these Black males and it was not just about the hoop,” Aldridge told The Skanner, “it was about what I can do with my life moving forward, and then I had examples of it: The coaches were doing incredible things, and it was just a cool space to be in.”

Aldridge has just completed his first full month as SEI’s new CEO, after mentorship from founder Tony Hopson and after a nationwide search. Despite having been along for the ride as an employee of SEI since 2000, Aldridge says he still marvels at what the organization is able to accomplish.

“There’s just an awful lot going on and a lot of folks that are pushing the envelope on opportunities for Black folks to come back home and thrive, as opposed to just existing,” Hopson told The Skanner.

Playing To Strengths

tony hopson intro Tony HopsonHopson is stepping aside as CEO, but he’s not retiring from the work.

“I’ve been trying to make this move for several years,” Hopson said of stepping down as CEO. “This happened because I feel like we have a very strong executive team, members who have been in the agency for a long time. Trent has been a part of our SEI world for twenty-something years, he knows the history, and he’s young, with energy, and ready to move it to the next level. After 40 years, a lot of the people I dealt with have come and gone, and I’m not a technology kind of guy, so the timing was good – but having the right people in place, I think, is the most important thing for me to be comfortable in making that move.”

Tony Hopson established SEI in 1981, hoping to offer local Black youths a positive experience in a city he felt was neglecting them. Even with these storied, relatively humble beginnings, Hopson’s talent for coalition-building was obvious from the beginning: Nike signed on as SEI’s first corporate sponsor that first year, and Hopson confirmed the company has provided in-kind donations of sportswear and shoes, as well as cash donations, to SEI every year since. Hopson now sits on the board of the 1803 Fund, a $400 million pledge from Phil and Penny Knight to rebuild the Albina neighborhood. The fund was established last year, and Hopson says he believes it the largest private gift to the African American community in U.S. history.

In 1988, the same year Aldridge participated in SEI’s basketball camp, the city had its first gang-related drive-by shooting. Both the shooter and the victim were teens involved with SEI, and Hopson had particular insight into their dynamics. It didn't seem to be a personal vendetta, he said; Los Angeles-based rival gangs the Bloods and the Crips had just that year established a presence in Portland, and the shooting seemed to be more about affiliation.

The city saw the potential of Hopson’s work and supplied funding to take SEI from a seasonal camp to a year-round program of wraparound services for at-risk youth and their families. By 1997, SEI had a physical headquarters and was expanding services to meet community needs as they arose.

Hopson understood from the beginning the fallacy of demonizing teens. He knew that disenfranchised adults struggled to provide safe home bases -- and that crime is so often the result of a failure of resources. He also understood that in providing those resources, personal connection was essential.

“We’ve always centered our work on having the right kind of person,” Aldridge said.

“We call them “superheroes” – coordinators, case managers, those people that do that work.

"We bring them to the center of places where people are struggling. A lot of the services that we provide here have a person where their job is to build a meaningful relationship with someone, and then use that relationship to help them get to a place where they can thrive, where their family can be restored, where they can have all of the things that they need.”

As SEI expanded, Hopson also prioritized the importance of showing youth and their families their options. Kids elementary school-aged and older could see, as Aldridge had, many diverse examples of prosperous Black adults. Through education programs at SEI, teens and their families learned of myriad paths open to them – and SEI helped demystify and remove barriers to those paths.

Hopson speaks fondly of successful SEI alums.

“We can talk about any number of individuals locally – the Rukaiyah Adams and Orlando Williams of the world, we could talk about the Nico Harrisons, the (general manager) for the Dallas Mavericks, we can talk about Ime Udoka, who’s the head coach for the Houston Rockets, Aaron Miles (assistant coach for the New Orleans Pelicans),” he said. “I take most pride in that, because that was the ultimate goal, to make sure that our kids, if given the opportunity and options, could be as successful as anyone else.

"After 40 years, we literally have thousands and thousands of kids that have gone through and are now positive contributing citizens in communities across this country."

So many of the staff members themselves are a testament to the program’s success.

“A young lady that I mentored when I first got here, she’s currently the director of our student and parents services – that’s the biggest component of our agency,” Aldridge said. “And so I was able to see her grow up into an incredible young woman, she went off to college, came back and then started as a case manager and worked her way up to this leadership role. To me, it’s like a full continuum: Not only do I get an opportunity to pour in, but that person can turn around and pour in somebody else who in turn pours into other people.”

Success Stories

Last year – Hopson’s last full year as CEO of SEI – the organization reported that 93% of SEI students graduated from high school, compared to a 72% graduation rate for Black students countywide and a 79% graduation rate for all students nationwide.

SEI bolstered so many of those grads by helping preserve and improve their households, awarding more than $3.3 million in funding for energy assistance to Portland clients. The organization also provided short-term rental assistance to 1,517 households and supported more than 100 individuals who were grappling with domestic and sexual violence.

To date, since its founding, SEI has served more than 100,000 youths and families.

“Our big, audacious goal is to serve every Black resident,” Aldridge said.

“And right now we serve roughly 17,000 folks a year, and there are 72,000 Black folks in the state of Oregon.”

It is harder to provide in-person services to Black Portlanders, who have been dispersed into different neighborhoods, counties and cities due to gentrification. But even in the last two years, Aldridge points out, SEI has grown in dramatic ways.

“Our programming has been stretching because we just got into affordable housing,” he said. “We have Alberta Alive, we’re going to have four projects on Alberta, over 150 units – you can’t do well in school if your homelife isn’t great, so we’re providing home, housing, energy, rental assistance to enrich families’ lives.

“But it’s only in Multnomah County right now. So how do we stretch to Washington County and offer services, in-person and virtually? Then how do we stretch to Clackamas County? Those are very reachable spaces. Then once we get into those places, how do we touch the entire state? It would be programmatic growth, technical assistance to other organizations so that they know how to do this successfully – we don’t think we're the only people that can do it. It’s about, how do we partner with other organizations as well to provide services that can stretch beyond just one organization’s capability?”

As Aldridge leads the organization in its next chapter, he says it is key to amplify the organizations’ many success stories as a way of getting the word out to other Black Oregonians who could benefit. And just as important, Aldridge said, will be keeping up with emerging technologies.

“Technology has been traditionally something the African American community has embraced slowly,” he said, “but as an organization, if we are the hub of a community, we need to be ahead of the curve, so that we’re constantly exposing our community to what’s possible. Sometimes technology can be an enabler to opportunity, and so a lot of our beginning, intermediate and long-term goals are surrounded with us just being a more tech-centric organization, and that’s what we can expose kids, family and community to.”

For more information about SEI, visit www.selfenhancement.org.