Given up for adoption at birth, Mark Charley spent years circulating through numerous foster homes in Newark, New Jersey.

After spending two and a half years in juvenile detention and falling two years behind in school, he was finally adopted by a family at the age of 13 and taken to Brighton, Alabama.

The adoption and move changed the direction of his life forever.

He is now CEO of Uncommon Results, a successful consulting company which focuses on personal and organisational development, and is the Managing Director for Youth at Risk, the United Kingdom arm of the company. In the US office there are 12 to 15 employees and in the UK there are another 25 full-time employees which means he has almost 50 people working for him at any one time.

The concept behind the programme is to give troubled young adults the chance to spend time trying to understand their lives, examine their beliefs and learn how to better manage their thoughts and feelings through a residential programme.

And now he is bringing his life lessons and experience in personal development to help the trouble teens of Bermuda in the Mirrors programme.

He spoke to The Royal Gazette about some of his life-defining moments, which helped him reach his current position.

“One of my teachers, Mrs. Daniels, for Black History Month in February made me memorise the Martin Luther King Jr. speech verbatim,” he said.

“But the practices were all during recess. All of my friends were out playing basketball and I was so jealous. She had a big record player and I would listen to it to get the tone and the rhythm.

“I practised all of January and delivered the speech to the school, then the PTA. I did so well, they took me to other Jefferson High schools.

“What it did was to put in me a recognition of something I was good at. I didn’t fear the public. My friends were all nervous about being in front of all those people. I just didn’t have that.”

And Mr. Charley has not been afraid of hard work since.

Influenced by a professor who fought in Vietnam, Mr. Charley enrolled in the Simultaneous Membership Program (SMP) with the Army. He hoped the programme would give him a further sense of direction and discipline.

SMP meant Mr. Charley attended university and served in the military, however, in his second year they offered him a scholarship, which would pay for college, but would require him to enlist immediately afterwards.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do following college so he turned down the scholarship.

Instead of help from the Army, Mr. Charley had to find other avenues to support his education.

He said: “I went to the University of Alabama in Birmingham. I worked every job from McDonald’s to laying tar on roofs to working in Wal-Mart. Anything to make money, I was doing.”

While in college, Mr. Charley had dreams of practising law, however, working as a Youth Advocate in the Roxbury Courts in Boston, Massachusetts and then as a programme director for the Breakthrough Foundation in California changed his mind.

He decided he needed to dedicate his life to transforming and helping troubled teens.

His inspirational story and innovative work with youth is why Premier Ewart Brown recruited him almost ten years ago to help at-risk youth in Bermuda.

Now years of co-ordination and correspondence have culminated in Mr. Charley’s first visit last month to train youth professionals on the Island.

The training for youth workers is the first step in his programme, which will then lead to a residential portion later this year for the teens.

Called Mirrors, the programme will consist of a six-day residential component on Paget Island in November followed by assigning each teen a life coach, who will help them become involved in the community.

The residential portion is for 30 to 40 young men and women between the ages of 15 and 18, who will be isolated from distractions on Paget Island in order to help them examine their lives.

The intensive course — which will make the students focus on how they arrived where they are, where they wish they could be and what they need to do to get there — will require the participants to work from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. every day.

Training for youth professionals enables them to experience what the teens will be doing in November, and is hoped to help them recruit and recommend participants.

The demand has been so high from the youth professionals that Mr. Charley, after two training sessions last month, will be back on the Island this month for a third. By the end of the training sessions, Mr. Charley will have worked with 100 to 120 youth professionals who will be able to support the residential portion.

The methodology behind the programme, which was tailored for Bermuda, has been used in many different countries and situations before.

Uncommon Results and Mr. Charley have worked with Serbians and Albanians trying to heal after years of war, with Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, as well as prisons and sports teams in the US.

And for each of these projects, the company tailors the programme so it is relevant to the participants, however, the information always remains the same — personal development and transformation.

“In 1991, the UK programme wanted their own local identity and Uncommon Results is happy to have local identity and not all of the control,” said Mr. Charley.

“It’s about empowering the community to do it themselves.

“Acting Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Social Rehabilitation Dianna Taylor and I were brainstorming when she came up with the idea of Mirrors with the inverted R to name the Bermuda programme.”

Mr. Charley now lives in Coral Gables, Florida with his wife, Amy, and son, Michael. “It really is an exciting time for everyone in the community,” he said of bringing Mirrors to work in Bermuda. “The dedication and commitment of Dale Butler, the officers and staff of the Ministry of Social Rehabilitation over the past three months to make this happen has been incredible.”