Tim Terrentine, one of Kalamazoo County’s fastest rising young leaders who was recently named Western Michigan University’s vice president of development and alumni relations, is today's featured guest on WMUK's WestSouthwest public-affairs show. At age 37, he’s already been an executive director of a nonprofit organization, and now a vice president for a second time. But in a candid interview with Earlene McMichael, Terrentine shares that his many successes almost didn’t happen, even having once dropped out of college until mentors intervened.
Terrentine explains that he had "given up on himself academically" by his sophomore year. He says that one of the issues with which he had been wrestling early in his life, and now has peace with, is a sense of abandonment because he was given up for adoption at birth in Saginaw. Around age 2, Kalamazoo couple Bob and Bonnie Terrentine gave him a forever home. Terrentine credits their love and that of mentors with his finally redirecting his grief into a life's mission to serve others.
"When you have had so many people step in the gap on your behalf who don't have to, there's an overwhelming sense of indebtedness," says Terrentine, who counts the late community leader Charles Warfield as among his numerous mentors.
Terrentine's first jobs were working with youth. He started out as a home support specialist for Kalamazoo Public Schools. Next he was a director for Proud 2 Be Me, the signature afterschool program of Yankees great Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation. The program works to keep kids away from alcohol and drugs.
Terrentine says that Jeter's father, Charles Jeter, who has a doctorate in substance abuse counseling, had recruited him for the position when the initiative was launching in the late '90s.
But though he was doing a good job for Proud 2 Be Me, Terrentine recalls that Charles Jeter had once threatened to fire him because he had dropped out of college along the way. Terrentine re-enrolled, ultimately getting both a bachelor's and a master's degree from Western Michigan University.
"Dr. Jeter and the Proud 2 Be Me program did a lot to change my life around, and told me that I had to aspire to higher," Terrentine says.
From there, Terrentine delved further into the nonprofit arena and joined Kalamazoo's Douglass Community Association as executive director, where he was for almost four years. He left in 2010 to become a vice president at Southwest Michigan First, a regional economic and leadership development group headquartered in downtown Kalamazoo.
In August of this year, he was appointed WMU's vice president of development and alumni relations, with oversight over the fundraising efforts of the university's foundation.
"I have no doubt that who I am today and where I am today is the product of people supporting, praying and helping me because I didn't start on third base," Terrentine says.
Asked by McMichael if there were any philosophies he likes to live by, Terrentine answers that he has been greatly influenced by the work of New York Times-bestselling author Wes Moore.
Terrentine says Moore "rocked his soul" when he spoke at Catalyst University, an annual leadership conference put on by Southwest Michigan First.
"He said, 'We are not products of our environment. We are products of our expectations,' " Terrentine says. "I went 'Whoa!'
"It knocked me out. What that says to me is, really, my life story. We're not necessarily how we got started. We're not even the environment we are in today. We are the products of what we expect of ourselves and others."
WestSouthwest airs Mondays and Thursdays at 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on 102.1 on the FM dial. It also livestreams at wmuk.org.
