I always think it’s unwise to put too high an expectation on others, because when I do, I’ll often come away disappointed.

I made that mistake with the Poetry Slam, which I teamed with my brother and nephew to hold at John Hay High School last month. Now, others played a role in supporting the spoken-word skills of 10 teenagers, all students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. I had counted on other organizations to chip in and help. Those organizations: local churches, nonprofit groups and two financial institutions.

I’ll mention one of the latter: Third Federal Savings & Loan. I met some of its representatives at a community event in April, and they expressed keen interest in being a part of the event. I exchanged several emails on the subject. But as Tuesday, May 12 neared, the savings and loan disappeared—vanished like the ace of spades in a magician’s card trick. Not a word from it, not even smoke signals. I decided I needed to let Third Federal know how I felt, so I wrote it an email the other day, which read:

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that Third Federal Savings & Loan did nothing to help make the Poetry Slam last month a success. The event at John Hay High School was a city-wide program, and yet your savings and loan chose to sit on the sidelines. Building a connection with young people matters, particularly when it comes to meeting them in their space. Third Federal decided not to.

 Also, you didn’t follow-up on the financial-literacy program we spoke about for the 12 Slam contestants. You went silent about it. I now know where your priorities lie. I’ll be looking to partner with another financial institution for the 2027 Poetry Slam — one that understands what’s at stake here. It’s difficult to watch any organization with the wherewithal turn its back on a literacy project that serves the same purpose for urban youngsters as the Spelling Bee does for suburban youth.

 Most frustrating of all, however, was the silence. If you didn’t want a role in the Poetry Slam, that’s a choice Third Federal was entitled to make — but say so. Instead, the financial institution went into ghost-mode. That’s not how you serve a poor, urban community that needs every resource it can get. It’s not how you serve young people at all.

Our society often wonders about teenagers today. We use words like “out of control,” “fragile” and “unmotivated” to describe Generation Z’ers and Alphas.  Of course, those words don’t fit all of them, and maybe they have become what they are because they haven’t found people who cared about them. We’ve saddled them with our criticisms, with our disappointments and with our low expectations of them, and maybe they’ve met us at those points in their young lives. They might just have figured if we don’t show we care about them, why should they put much effort into caring about themselves.

I might call that a defeatist view of things, but it might be the reality that’s in front of us.

Anyway, if institutions that should care don’t, where does that leave these Black boys and girls? I guess in search of outlets to explore their lives and to help them shape their tomorrows. They can’t often look at yesterdays as if they were beacons of light for them.

Their yesterdays are us, all wrapped tightly inside financial institutions like Third Federal, churches and cathedrals, and indifferent civic organizations. Or even in the lukewarm support these teens got from school administrators.