For Ken Weiner (M.A. ’69, Ph.D. ’75, mathematics), a knack for math and a passion for teaching led to a 37-year career as a mathematics professor and a game-changing nonprofit that helps at-risk students succeed.

Ken Weiner (M.A. ’69, Ph.D. ’75, mathematics) was always on a path to math—maybe before he even realized it. “It’s a weird thing to say because I was always very good at numbers and I always really liked math, but I honestly never remember making a conscious decision that majoring in math was something I wanted to do,” Weiner reflected. “I swear, I think I kind of woke up one day and I already had 16 credits in math or something like that, and I said, ‘Geez, I guess I'm a math major!’”

Weiner knows now that math was the right path for him all along. From his days as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College to his years in graduate school at the University of Maryland, Weiner charted a course to a long, successful career—as a professor and academic leader who taught math at Montgomery College for 37 years and also as co- founder and president of the board of directors for Future Link. This game-changing Rockville, Maryland, nonprofit provides at-risk young adults with free self-advocacy training, mentoring, paid internships, and career counseling programs to help them reach their academic and career goals.
“We are serving first-generation-to-college students who face economic adversities, but most also have other adversities in their lives,” Weiner explained. “And the mission has always been that these young adults have the potential to succeed, but they just do not have the resources or adults around them who could provide them with the advice and support needed to prepare them for higher education and professional careers.”
For Weiner, now retired, making an impact as a teacher and mentor means everything.

“I was thrilled with my career. I loved teaching. I loved everything about it,” Weiner said.
“To me, the thing that rules the world are relationships, and so throughout my teaching career, a big part for me has been to try not only to teach, but to build relationships with students and make a difference.”

Figuring it out

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Weiner took to math at an early age. “I remember when I was a young kid, my aunts and uncles would come over and they would give me all of these problems, they’d ask me, ‘What’s 28 times 32,’ and I’d have to figure it out,” Weiner recalled. “I started to really like math, and I had a cousin who was a math teacher who ultimately became sort of my mentor.” By the time Weiner finished his undergraduate degree in mathematics and started graduate school at UMD, he thought he was headed toward a career as an applied statistician. But when he started working as a teaching assistant and connected with an inspirational professor in the UMD Department of Mathematics, his perspective began to change.

“I started working with a professor named David Lay, who had been in the department for a number of years, and he was such a sensational teacher,” Weiner said. “I TAed under him for about three years, I loved all his mentorship and it had a huge impact on me. I think it really was one of the things that propelled me to move forward with teaching. ”After more than four years as a TA, Weiner realized he wanted to become the kind of mentor and teacher he saw in Lay. So, a few years after Weiner started his Ph.D., he found himself teaching mathematics at Montgomery College, eventually becoming a full-time professor after he earned his doctorate.
“I just loved everything about the environment and the whole experience. I got so into where I was at Montgomery, it was a great time to be there,” Weiner said. “And before I knew it, I just was sort of part of that culture and happy to be there.”

A new mission

Weiner continued teaching at Montgomery College until he retired in 2008. Then, he worked as a consultant on various college projects, including a task force charged with improving the college’s developmental math program and another project working with local nonprofits that set the stage for his next mission. “United Way, the City of Gaithersburg and the City of Rockville joined together, and they asked the college if anybody could teach all the nonprofits in Montgomery County how to measure outcomes, and so I, together with two colleagues, started doing that,” Weiner explained. “We must have trained 300 nonprofits in just a few years.”
As a result of that work, Weiner joined the board of directors at a transitional homeless shelter, and helped the nonprofit develop a new educational program for at-risk young adults. “We wanted to create a program that would help vulnerable young people avoid chemical addiction and homelessness, which is what that shelter was dealing with,” Weiner recalled. “Kids would age out of foster care at 18 and they would get thrown back into society with no preparation and no ability to navigate the real world and we wanted to help them.”

After some research and a lot of brainstorming, Future Link was born. What started as a small weekly seminar to help kids who needed mentoring and guidance has since grown into a full-on educational and career support program, with individualized services from paid internships, career coaching, tutoring and mentoring to scholarships, training and more—a place, as the program’s motto notes, ‘Where potential meets opportunity.’ For 17 years, Weiner has contributed his time and expertise as a leader, mentor and teacher in the program, and he couldn’t be prouder of what Future Link has accomplished.
“If you look at the program now, 17 years later, we have some 270 adult volunteers, including 150 adults who are doing one-on-one mentoring with students. We've recently created a career coaching program, and there are about 80 volunteers who work individually with each student about to leave college and go into the workplace to prepare them to get a job,” Weiner explained. “Future Link is a long-term commitment to every student that participates in the program to get them through the education they need for the career they're interested in.” For Weiner, who knows from his own experience just how valuable teaching and mentoring can be, making that kind of impact couldn’t be more important. And even now that he’s retired, students still reach out to say thank you.

“One of my former Future Link students is now a policeman in Baltimore. This is a kid that was struggling in El Salvador when he was young and he's now married with two young children and loves what he does,” Weiner explained, “Probably three times a week I get a text from him saying, “I don't know where I would be if it wasn't for what you did for me.” The feeling that you have impacted somebody's life that way, there's just nothing better.”

Written by Leslie Miller