Nonprofit shares positive messages in Mulberry; improves individuals, community

Ruby Amos gently lowered her dainty right hand into a puddle of paint, turning her palm a shade of mustard yellow that matched the hem of her dress.

The 1-year-old toddled toward a white, cinder-block wall and found the right spot to slap it. Her siblings and a cousin followed her example, decorating a mural at Spence Park in Mulberry with handprints in fuchsia, indigo and chartreuse.

The children’s simple artistry complemented the mural’s uncomplicated essence: the word “believe,” painted in black, in all lower-case letters, followed by a period.

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Ruby’s father, Lee Amos, is the founder and leader of Inspired Ambitious Young Believers, a nonprofit dedicated to individual and community improvement. The group received permission from the city to create the message mural on the side of a small building formerly used as a concession stand and now a storage facility.

“I like keeping it simple,” Amos said. “Like I said, with the period — I mean, just believe that you can do anything that you put your mind to. No matter if you're from a small city, whatever you've been through — that ties into mental health — that anything is possible.”

Amos, 30, is a native of Mulberry, a city of about 4,500 surrounded by former phosphate mines. A sinewy 6-foot-4, he played basketball and ran track at Mulberry High School, graduating in 2010.

After finishing high school, Amos spent several years in law enforcement, working for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and the Winter Haven Police Department. He now has a day job with the Mulberry Community Service Center, a nonprofit supporting people facing financial hardships, and works security at nights for Lighthouse Ministries, a Christian nonprofit in Lakeland dedicated to helping poor and at-risk people.

Amos is also serving an enlistment with the U.S. Army Reserve as a Military Police officer. That duty requires serving for one weekend a month, plus two weeks of training a year and the occasional deployment to such locations as Cuba.

The father of Ruby, another daughter, Jaleah, 11, and a son, Paxton, 6, he said he is pursuing a master’s degree to become a licensed mental health counselor.

Seeking to motivate

Amos created Inspired Ambitious Young Believers, or IAYB, in 2019, incorporating as an official nonprofit with the state of Florida. He said the group seeks to provide “motivational content” and engage in charitable giving.

IAYB has done such events as providing free haircuts to clients at Lighthouse Ministries, as Amos — former owner of a barbershop that he said closed during the COVID-19 pandemic — took up his clippers. The organization has also given out bags of personal supplies to women in programs at Lighthouse, he said.

Amos said that he is seeking approval to provide mentoring for students at Mulberry High School. He said IAYB has led to speaking engagements at local churches, most recently one at Friendship Church in Mulberry that focused on the mental health of young people.

“We’re huge advocates on mental health,” Amos said. “To say it as a degree, we’re majoring in believing in yourself and minoring in mental health.”

Soon after forming IAYB, Amos turned his attention to Spence Park, which occupies about four blocks surrounded by a residential neighborhood in northeast Mulberry. Originally a baseball complex, the park now contains a community swimming pool, a skateboard area, a basketball court, a tennis court and a bandstand.

The park regularly hosts city-sponsored events, such as the Mulberry Harvest Festival and Mulberry’s Christmas Village.

In seeking ways to spread IAYB’s message of positivity, Amos realized that the former concessions building was an unused canvas. He arranged for Gabriela Jaxon, a well-known mural artist from Lakeland, to create a mural for the exterior wall that faces Northeast 10th Avenue.

Jaxon produced an abstract background of neutral tones against which the capitalized word “MULBERRY” jumps out, written in lime green with a shadow of candy-apple red, with the smaller words “WHY NOT” in white set above it.

Amos, a relentlessly upbeat fellow who often begins sentences with, “Yessir, yessir,” said he wanted the kids who frequent Spence Park to absorb that message: Why not Mulberry?

“We're such a small town, and I get this when I speak all the time,” Amos said. “I remember I was speaking over at the high school for an event, and a lot of the kids were like, ‘I'm from Mulberry. Nothing really comes from here.’ … Like, ‘How can I get to that next (level)? How can I follow my dream?’ And I tell people all the time, ‘Well, why not you? Why not Mulberry? Why not the small city? Why not the person who everybody counted out?’”

The new mural occupies the opposite side of the storage building, facing the interior of the park. Curtis Smith, another leader of IAYB, came up with the simple but powerful concept of the word “believe” followed by a period. Members contributed colorful handprints, all of them directed upward, around the perimeter of the white, cinder-block wall.

Meeting a reporter and photographer on Tuesday afternoon, Amos and his fiancée, Samantha Jenkins, brought along their daughter, Ruby, along with Lee Amos’ two older children and his their niece, Aubrey Amos, to add further decoration on the lower portion of the wall.

'Positive vibes'

Jenkins poured the paint onto paper plates, and the kids decided which colors best suited them. Aubrey, wearing her school uniform, wore a serious expression as she planted a fuchsia-covered palm against the wall.

“It was really great, and I like it,” Aubrey said later of the painting experience.

Paxton was asked what he thought of the mural’s one-word message.

“I think it's the best,” he said. “And believe means believing in yourself.”

Aubrey said she has joined her uncle at other IAYB activities.

“It’s really fun because I get to do my stuff, what I like to do, and he asked me to help,” she said.

Mulberry City Manager Rick Johnson has an appreciation for public art. He arranged in 2019 to have Lakeland artist Ernest Craft III paint a mural on a low wall stretching 110 feet along S.R. 37 near the town center. Craft’s rendering of a lakeside scene evokes the buoyant images of the Florida artists known as the Highwaymen.

Johnson said he welcomed Amos’ suggestion of enhancing the park with inspirational messages.

“We really try to capture the overall positive vibes in the city,” he said.

Of Amos, he said: “He’s just got a heart for kids, for youth, particularly here in Mulberry. He’s very involved in their success.”

Johnson said Spence Park is an important location as the site for such events as the Christmas Village, which he said draws 3,000 to 4,000 people each year. He said the swimming pool and basketball court are filled with kids throughout the summer.

“That’s one of the sort of intersections of the city, where the middle schoolers and high schoolers and the elementary school kids all walk either right past there or within a block in one way or another,” Johnson said. “I just think that that imprints a real positive message on them on the way to or from school.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Group's handiwork spreads positive messages at park in Mulberry