From incarceration to advocating for at-risk youth

Kai Smith is founder and executive director of GRAAFICS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Gang Diversion, Reentry And Absent Fathers Intervention Clinical Services as per its acronym. As someone who was formerly incarcerated, Smith founded the GRAAFICS organization to service at-risk youth and recently founded a healthcare company aimed at tackling health inequities particularly present in Black and Hispanic communities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was reading your bio on your website, and it was about you in the last years of when you were in prison. You were mapping out a plan for rehabilitation, which eventually turned into what GRAAFICS is today. Can you go into that?

I was incarcerated in Virginia, and I had gotten into a fight and I ended up going to solitary confinement. In solitary confinement, you are in a cell, and it's literally a six-by-nine cell, and you're in that cell for 23 hours a day, you come out one hour into a dog cage, and you just stand up and walk around a circle in a little six-by-nine dog cage, and then you go back in. 

So I found myself in solitary confinement… when you are in a space like that, where it's controlled. You go back on your mind and your body takes you back to whatever patterns that you had that could make that situation comfortable, that my grandmother forced me to build within myself that I had to tap into to make prison solitary confinement comfortable, was reading. And so just like in the movie Shawshank Redemption, in this facility, there was a trustee that would come through with this cart type of thing, with just a bunch of books. And I've been in solitary confinement so long that I had read every book on that cart. And when the guy was coming around, he came around on Sundays, and when the guy was coming around, I looked at the cart, and I was like, damn, I was like, damn, I read everything on the card, and it was just one book that I was saying I just don't want to read. I just don't want to read it. But it was nothing else for me to read. So I said, You know what? Give me the book and … there was something about incarceration and programming and second chances in this book. And at the back of the book, there was a worksheet, and the first question in the worksheet, and it was taken into consideration that you read the book, but reason being, I had, you could fill out a slip and send a letter to the commissary, which is the prison store, and purchase items from the prison commissary, from the prison store. I began to order yellow notepads. Back then, [they] were 50 cents, and I remember ordering about $10 worth of those notepads. And every time commisary came around, which was once a week, I would order $10 worth of those pads. And I just began to just jot down my ideas like, you know, just began to write and write and write and whatever popped into my head, I would write it, and I said to myself, who better to design a re-entry program, or a program for guys that was in-and-out of jail that grew up in households where their parents were in jail and all that. Who better to design a program like that than me? The first question in the worksheet was, ‘if you could design an effective re-entry program, what would it look like?’ And it took me two years to answer that one question.

And about two years later, I was released and came home with a military duffel bag full of those notepads. I enrolled into Metropolitan College in New York and it was at MCNY where I met a professor…Paul Henderson. He taught me how to take those notebooks from prison, and using the MCNY curriculum, he taught me how to take all it and turn it into or turn it into the program that I have today.

Your professor helped you take the notes you wrote while incarcerated, and turned that into  an actual game plan for founding GRAAFICS. Can you tell me more about that?

Professor Henderson is one of the owners at a substance abuse company called Vertex and at the time he was the [assistant ]commissioner [and director of program services] for the New York City Department of Probation. And, he was an adjunct professor. So coming home, I just liked being in his class, because he was a real dude. Professor Henderson just made it so comfortable. You could share ideas that you thought were stupid and and he would never make you feel like that. I had been incarcerated so long, and had been in the streets so long, I didn't have a fear factor. So, I never was afraid to say what was on my mind  or to ask a question. I had God and my grandmother and what I learned in the streets on my side. I remember one day saying to him, “You know, I want to start my own program.” He said, “Yeah, tell me more about that, right?” And so, we started talking about it. 

And then one day, I was coming home from school, and I got to my building, and I'm walking into the lobby of my building, and Professor Henderson is walking out of the building, and I was like, “Yo, what you doing here?” He was like, “What you doing here? I live in this building. I live on the 12th floor.” I said, “I live on the third floor,” and from then on, we were tight, like two peas in a pod. I was always able to run things by him. He literally helped me connect all of my writings to the Metropolitan College New York syllabus. He showed me how to weed everything, secure the data, connect my thoughts to research, how to identify white papers and literature. It was a beautiful experience. 

I’ll never forget when I finally got to the version of the program that was released into society. He said, “From here you gotta fail your way to success. From here on, all the paperwork you do, let it fly. He made some phone calls and got a couple of people for me to stand in front of and pitch it, and got a couple people to give me some tryouts. He got the commissioner from the Department of Probation to give me a shot, and that turned into my first contract with New York City. And then I got a contract with the Administration for Children’s Services and then another contract with the New York City Department of Education. And it's been that way ever since. It's my grandmother's model for what she did for my life. I just took it and I put it on paper.

Your relationship with your grandmother?

My grandmother's name was Lucille Zella. If you want to call me something, call me Lucille’s grandchild, right? I don't care anything about degrees. I have six felonies. I have almost six college degrees, right? I stopped doing the PhD so that I could pivot to go to law school. I started in law school this year, and people go, “Why are you doing that? Like, oh, my God, why do you need so much education?” Well, I'm in children's health care, and once I become a corporate health attorney, then I can go back to finish the PhD. I can publish my dissertation as a book, turn it into a model. And anytime a decision is made about the health care of a Black or brown child in the state of New York, I may not make the decision, but I am definitely going to be in the room. So there's a method to the madness. My grandmother, oh, man, she saw it. I didn't. She saw it the whole time. 

What are some misunderstandings out there about at-risk youth?

So the biggest misconception is, kids don't want to learn. They don't want to behave, right? These kids want it, but they want to respect the person that's giving that to them. I want to deal with these kids. I want to deal with them being disrespectful. Working with them, I see that that's not the case. Frederick Douglass said – and I say this to people all the time – kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Kids don't give a damn about how many degrees you got. They don't give a damn about any of that. 

I  have young adults that came to GRAAFICS in 2004 and 2005. They’re grown with their own kids now and they still checked in. We talk. I see the kids. They call me from vacation. I check on them for their birthdays. One of my students that was in the Crips gang is doing amazingly well right now. He called me the other day. He said that he's in a lot of interviews. He said, “Yo, you know why I love you, man. I said, “Why do you love me?” He said, “You remember what you said the first day you came to our class?” I said, “Yeah, I remember. I say the same thing to every class I go to: Once you are locked in with me, you are locked in. All I got to give you is me. Anything else that I give you is extra. My phone number ain't never gonna change. I'm never gonna leave you. I'm never gonna abandon you anytime you need me, I'm gonna be there. Call me. Chat with me.” He was like, “Yo, it's 2025 and your number is still the same… You like the hood dad.” 

You also founded Better Urban Health. Could you tell me more about that?

There are a significant number of things that Black and Hispanic children are suffering from that if diagnosed properly, it will put our feet on the path in the direction of the change that we need. That's the mission of better Urban Health, to do everything that we can to introduce those that are interested into the joy and pleasure of mental health services and behavioral health and etiquette. We are contracted with the New York State Department of Health. We are fully insured, fully accredited. We are designated to provide case management care, management and behavioral health services [across NYC and some counties in New York state]. If God spares my life, and my grandmother continues to ask God to bless me, my goal is for us to be as big as CityMD.

Better Urban Health can [be used to put children] in front of a therapist that looks like him or her, to help peel back some of these layers. One of the services that we provide to the school, behavior management, is a family wrap around services. So if the child is experiencing something that's going on in the household, because the child is eligible for services from us and in the school, we absorb the cost of providing services to the family.

What are some things you’re looking forward to coming up in  your work?

I'm in the process of doing a five borough health day. I'm putting together a couple of hundred health care providers to block off streets and told the providers and insurance plans this health care is going to be different. People are going to leave the health fair with appointments. You're not coming to the health fair to get barbecue chicken, to get candy. You come to the health fair to get health care information, health care literacy, to see doctors. You come and make sure you're leaving with an appointment for the day spa, for the massage parlor, for the Pilates place, to get your blood pressure checked. It is going to be a real health fair. You are leaving with a week's worth of appointments from everybody that you see out here.