“If you can survive deployment with the military, you can literally do anything.”
Bishop Jennings comes from a long line of people who build things with their hands.
His grandfather, Oscar Smith, has run his own HVAC business in Cleveland for 45 years, and his grandmother, Tee Smith, earned a biology degree from Kent State University. His father, Michael Jennings, plated metal in a factory. His mother, Lashawnda Smith, is a realtor and construction manager, and the first Black woman in Ohio to earn her boiler’s license.
They are a family of thinkers as much as builders. “My family believes that our education started 100 years before we were born,” Bishop said. Bishop just took the family trade somewhere none of them expected: the flight deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.
“You’ve got F-18 jets landing twenty feet away from you every five minutes,” Bishop said of his five years as a Navy aviation technician. “You really have to mind your P’s and Q’s up there.”
Bishop, now 24 and a collegian of Hope Ignites Northeastern Ohio, grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Cleveland, raised by his father, with weekends spent at his grandparents’ house. “My grandfather would teach me things now and then, ever since I was a little boy,” he said. His father had survived being struck by a bus when Bishop was small, enduring dozens of surgeries and years of hard rehab to get his mobility and function back. “He was a very strong man mentally,” Bishop said.
Bishop was a quiet, logical kid who loved school, especially math, science, and history. “I loved that there were definitive answers,” he said. In fifth grade, a note appeared in his cubby: an invitation to the Academy program of Hope Ignites, which he and his fellow scholars called “Hope Prep.” Six students at his school were selected. Bishop was the only one who said yes.
“My father and my grandmother both told me all the time, ‘Don’t say no to opportunity,'” he said. “You get the chance to do something, take it, because life is hard.”
What sealed his decision was meeting Tim Grady, then the affiliate’s Executive Director. “I will never forget this man talking to me like an adult,” Bishop said. “He asked me what I wanted to do in life. I always despised being treated as a child when I was young, and here was this man talking to me like an adult.”
After talking it over with his father and grandparents, Bishop joined Hope Ignites Northeastern Ohio.
Bishop, on the left, with his other cousins. “We’ve been together our whole lives,” he said.
As an Academy scholar, Bishop spent after-school hours and summers at John Carroll University, learning far more than academics. “One of the themes was for us to have this ‘Yet’-attitude. I’m not good at this yet, but I will be,” he recalls. “I would almost call it a better version of school, because they teach you everything that you don’t learn in school.”
The program helped place him at St. Edward High School, “a very nice private school that I wouldn’t have found without Hope Ignites.”
“It was a huge culture shock, but in a good way,” he said. “I had perfect grades from kindergarten to eighth grade and never had to try. At St. Edward’s, I had to catch up in order to keep up.”
Junior year brought college fairs, financial aid forms, and a hard look at the numbers. “I had never seen so many zeros,” Bishop said, talking about tuition costs. He knew his family “would have worked themselves to death” to send him to college, and he refused to put that weight on them before he even knew what he wanted to study. “I would rather go to the military and get it all paid for.” At 17, with his mother’s permission, and her firm instruction to the U.S. Navy that nothing happen to her only son, he enlisted.
Five years took him from Virginia to Point Mugu, California, maintaining MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters, with stops in Guam and Malaysia. For a young man who had left Ohio exactly once before enlisting, it changed everything. “Traveling was the biggest mind-opener for me, ever,” he said.
“The biggest lesson I took away was that I can do what I want to do. If you can survive deployment with the military, you can literally do anything.”
Bishop with his grandfather, mom, and dad.
Squadron co-workers in the US Navy.
“You have options. Go follow your dreams, go do what you want to do. I’ll help you any way I can.”
Today Bishop studies environmental science at Cleveland State University, a field his mother calls “the college version of what your grandfather does.” The choice was deliberate: Bishop’s grandfather Oscar has run his business alone for 45 years, and his single regret is never going to college.
“He doesn’t wish for anything, but that’s the one thing,” Bishop said. “He worked his whole life. I don’t want to see it go to nothing.” Bishop plans to use his degree to grow the family business into something that outlasts them all.
He is already investing in the next generation. This summer, Bishop served as a Legacy Leader for Hope Ignites’ Envision U program, which took place at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. There, he mentored rising high school seniors from across the Hope Ignites Network and helped chaperone different excursions, leading group activities, and made sure the younger scholars had everything they needed. “It almost brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “There are not a lot of times as a young Black man where you have another young Black man you can look up to.”
By the end of the trip, scholars who had sized him up as “just another teacher” were confiding in him their real dreams: the Air Force, college, even owning a barbershop. His message to each of them was the same one that changed his own life in the fifth grade.
“You have options. Go follow your dreams, go do what you want to do,” he told them. “And I’ll help you any way I can.”
Bishop with his grandma, Tee Smith.
Bishop with his squadron captain the day he left the military.
