12/05/2026
What an amazing Story! OMG!! Thank you Carmen Evans for nominating this amazing King, who has evolved from trauma to treasure and impacting lives!!!
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CROWN REIGN CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
is so incredibly grateful to Honor you !!!!!
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James “Screal” Eberheart Jr
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****Full story***:
James Screal Eberheart Jr. was born and raised in Inkster, Michigan, a community that taught him early what happens when systems neglect their people. Inkster shaped his understanding of resilience, community bonds, and the cost of abandonment. It also shaped a quiet conviction: that the way things are is not the way they have to be.
🏆In 2006, at eighteen years old, Screal graduated from Crestwood High School in Dearborn Heights and made a deliberate choice to move to Detroit.
He carried with him the dreams that many young people have of ambition, hope, and a belief that hard work would create opportunity. He enrolled at Wayne County Community College District (WCCCD) to study Computer Information Systems, positioning himself for a career in technology, and to support himself, he worked in the communications field as a Cable Technician, joining the corporate workforce.
🏆For the next eight years, Screal did what the system told him to do: get an education, get a job, climb the ladder.
He was disciplined. He was working. By conventional measures, he was succeeding.
But in 2008, two years into his Detroit life, his best friend was killed by gun violence.
The loss was devastating in the way that only losing someone you love to preventable violence can be. It wasn't an accident, It wasn't an illness. It was the direct consequence of systems that had decided certain neighborhoods and certain lives were disposable.
His best friend's death forced a question that would reshape everything:
Why do we accept this as inevitable?
Why do we treat this as a failure of individual neighborhoods rather than a failure of collective responsibility?
That question lived with him through the next six years of corporate work. It gnawed at him during cable technician shifts. It followed him through WCCCD classes. It was the undertow beneath the surface of his success, this growing awareness that he was building a life separate from the struggle he'd come from, that he was accepting a bargain: stability in exchange for silence.
In 2014, after eight years in corporate America, that internal conflict became impossible to ignore.
A serious workplace injury forced a physical reckoning but more importantly, it became a spiritual one. The injury wasn't just a setback; it was clarification.
Screal made a decision that many would call reckless: he left corporate employment and committed himself full-time to understanding the psychological, social, and systemic conditions that make violence, poverty, and hopelessness seem inevitable in communities like the one that raised him and that had taken his best friend.
He began an intensive, independent study of psychology, trauma, and how the mind works under conditions of systemic oppression. This wasn't academic study at first it was survival study. He needed to understand why his community was breaking. He needed to understand what healing could look like at scale.
In 2014, the same year he left corporate work, Screal started his own business: Hopz Mgmt. This was his first venture into entrepreneurship, born from necessity and conviction. Hopz Mgmt. allowed him to work in community spaces, build relationships, and test ideas about how economic opportunity and community development could coexist. His dedication, insight, and marketing skill set earned him a seat on the Board of Directors for New Era Detroit (N.E.D.), a grassroots organization centered on socio economic justice.
As Chief Visionary/Executive Officer of New Era, Screal's responsibility was to translate his emerging philosophy into programs. In 2015, he created Black To Reality (BTR), a youth development program. But BTR was never just a program, it was a systems intervention. Its curriculum addressed remedial math and reading skills, peer mentoring, and social-emotional development because Screal had learned something critical: you don't transform lives by treating people as problems to be fixed. You transform lives by treating them as capable leaders whose communities have been denied resources.
The success of New Era Detroit's broader approach caught national attention. Within three years of full-time community work, Screal helped establish New Era chapters across the country. By 2017, New Era was operating in Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Birmingham, Las Vegas, and Long Beach—and still growing. The organization he helped develop became recognized nationally as a model for community-led change.
During this period, Screal was evolving. He was learning that programs alone weren't enough. Individual organizations weren't enough. He was beginning to understand that real transformation required integrated thinking and the recognition that entrepreneurship, mental wellness, civic engagement, and community empowerment weren't separate challenges but interconnected systems.
In August 2018, his work at New Era was formally recognized with a promotion to Vice President, a testament to his ability to think at scale while maintaining deep community accountability. By this point, he'd been in full-time community work for four years. He'd built coalitions with local residents, other community organizations, Black businesses, and institutional partners. He'd learned how to navigate both grassroots organizing and institutional spaces. He'd proven he could develop national programming while staying rooted in the community.
But something was still incomplete. The separate programs were working, but they weren't addressing the root: the idea that these challenges to mental health, economic opportunity, civic power, and community voice could be treated as separate issues rather than as symptoms of a single systemic failure.
In 2017, Screal had run as a write-in candidate for Detroit City Council District 1, signaling his belief that change required showing up everywhere: in grassroots coalitions and in rooms where policy decisions are made. Though he didn't win, the race deepened his understanding of political systems and civic power.
Throughout this period, Screal continued his independent study in psychology, eventually formalizing it as coursework in Mental Health and African-American Psychology at Wayne County Community College. He wasn't just managing programs; he was building a theoretical framework. He was asking: What does it actually take to heal a community that has been systematically harmed?
By 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the nation to confront health inequities and the murder of George Floyd sparked national uprising, Screal was positioned at the intersection of multiple movements. He became a Community Visioneer for Force Detroit/Faith In Action (2020–2023), where he collaborated in fundraising a $3.3 million budget and securing $500K from the State of Michigan Violence Intervention budget. He regranted approximately $700K annually to grassroots organizations and leaders, providing strategic leadership to Force campaigns and building cross-functional teams that ensured coordination across community organizations, philanthropic bodies, and government officials.
Simultaneously, from 2020–2022, he served as National City Manager for TandemED/Own Your Story, overseeing grant programs addressing social issues affecting African American and Black residents across Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Jackson. He regranted approximately $1.1 million to community projects and organizations, conducting comprehensive due diligence and landscape analysis to identify high-performing, community-aligned organizations.
This period 2020 to 2023 was transformational. Screal was assisting in securing millions of dollars, convening coalitions at state and federal levels, developing national programming, and learning at an accelerated pace. He was studying how systems work, how money flows, how power operates, and how communities resist and lead. He was testing hypotheses about what transformation actually requires.
By 2023, after nearly a decade of full-time community work, after starting and growing businesses, after managing programs and budgets and coalitions, after studying psychology and systems and power, Screal was ready for something new.
In 2023, he founded M.I.N.D.S. (Motivating Inner New DreamS), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But M.I.N.D.S. was not a new idea it was the integration of eighteen years of learning: as a young person grieving violence, as a corporate worker compartmentalizing his conscience, as an entrepreneur building his first business, as a program developer creating Black To Reality, as a national organizer regranting millions, as a student of psychology and systems.
M.I.N.D.S. was built on a single, clarified conviction: entrepreneurship, mental wellness, civic engagement, and community empowerment are not separate programs but interconnected infrastructure for community power. You cannot address economic opportunity without addressing mental health. You cannot build civic power without an economic foundation. You cannot create lasting community empowerment without attending to the psychological impact of systemic oppression. They are one system.
What distinguishes Screal's approach is philosophical and hard-won: he doesn't solve for communities; he builds with them, returning agency to the people closest to the challenge.
Since 2023, Screal has continued to advance this vision. He has expanded digital access and equity work across Michigan through his role as Senior Moonshot Ambassador with Merit Network, helping underserved communities gain infrastructure never designed with them in mind. He has worked with Detroit Housing Commission properties through Canopy313 and the State of Michigan/City of Detroit Eduroam initiatives to democratize enterprise-grade WiFi resources. He has developed community-led programs including Game On E-Sports, and the Community Volunteer Leadership Council (CVLC).
In 2026, concluding his service as National Team Lead for American Connection Corps/Lead For America, Screal has positioned himself to continue expanding this work potentially through graduate education, municipal government leadership, or deeper nonprofit work.
Recognition has followed Screal's work not from visibility-chasing, but from integrity. He is a recipient of the 2024 Soul and Harmony Award, the 2023 Spirit of Detroit Award, appointment to the 2023 ForbesBLK Local Advisory Council, and has received special tributes from both chambers of the Michigan Legislature. These honors acknowledge work rooted in a singular, unshakeable conviction: lasting change is never delivered from the outside; it is grown from within.
Yet what defines Screal most profoundly is not the accolades or the programs or the dollars managed. It's that every initiative he touches carries the fingerprint of communities trusted to lead themselves. He shows up in rooms where decisions are made and in neighborhoods where those decisions land. He operates at local, state, and national scales without ever losing the thread back to the block, back to Inkster, back to the best friend he lost, back to the young people of Detroit who deserve to inherit something better than what was inherited by his generation.
His eighteen-year journey from grieving young man in 2008, through corporate compartmentalization, through workplace injury and awakening, through entrepreneurship and program development, through national organizing and million-dollar budgets, through deep study of psychology and systems, to the philosophical integration embodied in M.I.N.D.S. in 2023 is the journey of someone who refused to accept that certain lives are disposable. Who learned, through loss and labor, that the antidote to systemic oppression is not charity or saviorism. It is infrastructure that returns power to the people closest to the challenge.
That is who Screal is. That is the evolution Crown Reign Christian University would honor in recognizing hi
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