Sitting in his air conditioned office at the Family & Community Services headquarters in Ravenna, Rodney Mack, 52, spoke easily of his two incarcerations for assault and of his transformation to a post-prison life of service.
Mack, whose grandmother, Sara Jackson, was a director of the Skeels Community Center, wasn’t always community minded. That took a jailhouse awakening and the support of several key people. He’d had enough.
“Everybody’s got their enough,” he said.
In 2017, Mack started Enough is Enough, a nonprofit he still leads from his Oakwood Street office. Under Mack’s leadership, Enough is Enough has held breakfasts for senior citizens, multiple religious retreats, a community recognition dinner, an academy aimed at people who wish to become peer recovery coaches, and an event he calls All Lives Matter.
When we met, Mack was gearing up for another event that weekend: Summer Time, held Saturday at the King Kennedy Community Center in Ravenna. The event offered refreshments, a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, music, cornhole, and water balloon throwing for children and adults. Like all Enough is Enough’s events, it was free.
Mack volunteers his time and effort to keep Enough is Enough afloat while working as a landscaper to support himself and his wife, Nichole Bowman. It’s hard going sometimes, but it’s worth it.
“If it ain’t rough, it ain’t right,” he grinned.
Mack said he decided to dedicate his life to serving God and people, and even while in prison he encouraged death row inmates to never stop dreaming or hoping.
“If you don’t have hope, you don’t have anything,” he said. “Sometimes all a prisoner has is hope. You lose your soul, your life.”
Mack said he started looking at church as a relationship instead of a religion, and ended up feeling like he was chosen to do God’s work.
“When you get tired of the lifestyle, you have to change your lifestyle, change your thinking. I don’t fight today. I just love today,” he said.
Mack hasn’t forgotten what formed him, or lost sight of where he is going. The walls of his office are covered with posters, some of them inspirations, some of them quotations:
Muhammad Ali: “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
Mark Twain: “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Having known Mack all his life, community organizer Frank Hairston watched as Mack became an agent for good instead of negativity. Ever supportive, he still sends Mack Bible tracts every day.
“People kind of gravitate toward him. He has a good heart and he’s a good person,” Hairston said. “He’s always striving to do good things in the community.”
Mark Frisone, executive director of Family & Community Services of Portage County, recalls receiving a cold call from Mack some years ago. Someone had told Mack that Frisone, or at least the agency he heads, would be “a good place to begin what I call his redemption tour,” Frisone said.
The pair spoke at length, and Frisone said he emerged “cautiously optimistic” that Mack was sincere.
“He did impress upon me that after a lot of the pain he’d caused people in his life, he wanted to do good in this world, and I thought that was a commendable position to take,” he said.
Frisone kept an eye on Mack, and offered him office space when Mack proved he could offer more than pretty words. He helps Family & Community Services with its landscaping and, with funding from the Mental Health and Recovery Board of Portage County, helps prisoners who struggle with reentry into society after incarceration.
Frisone related one incident where an 81-year-old man, thin and frail, showed up at his office. Covid had prompted officials to reduce jail populations, and this man had found himself on the sidewalk.
He sat before Frisone and wept, begging to be returned to the only home he’d known for over 60 years. Stumped, Frisone turned to Mack, who immediately showed up. He found the man a place to live, helped him obtain needed identification documents and got him set up with Social Security benefits.
“I don’t know what I would have done with that person if I didn’t have Rodney Mack,” Frisone said. “Rodney could connect with him in a way that no one else could have. We are fortunate to have Rodney in this community doing the work that he does.”
The Mental Health and Recovery Board also funds a peer supporter program, training people who have been impacted by any number of addictions, life events, and mental health issues to effectively help others.
Frisone encouraged Mack to become a certified peer supporter, focusing on former prisoners who struggle to reenter society.
“That is a very difficult group to be with,” Frisone said. “He takes that role extremely seriously. He does really well with that population. A person who’s been in that system has a unique perspective. It makes him very effective with that particular group.”
No one can turn back the clock, but Frisone said Mack has “long since won me and a lot of other folks over. Giving people an opportunity to make amends is the right thing to do. In this case it worked out great. People can change.”
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.