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Our Mission
Fathers’ UpLift provides mental health counseling, coaching, and advocacy to assist fathers with overcoming barriers (racism, emotional, traumatic, and addiction-based barriers) that prevent them from remaining engaged in their children’s lives. We also provide mentoring, cultural outings, and counseling to children who are growing up without their fathers.
Meet Our Founders: Dr. Charles C. Daniels, Jr. & Samantha Fils-Daniels
Mrs. Samantha Fils-Daniels is the co-founder of Fathers’ Uplift, INC. She grew up with an active and engaged father. When she was born, her mother and father split up. She says, “I always felt as if my father was there,” even though her father resided in Florida, and she lived in Haiti with her mother. Although there was distance, she always felt that her father was active in her life; “I was a daddy’s girl and would periodically tell my mom I will call my dad on you.”
When she thinks about the support she received from her father, she often reflects on an incident when he thought she was scheduled to have surgery after receiving a call from her mother. He was so concerned he flew to Haiti the next day to see what was going on with her. That moment permanently solidified that feeling of knowing that her father would always be there when she was in need. At the age of 10, she moved in with her father and his family in Fort Myers, Florida, where she remained until college. At the age of 19, she met her future husband, Charles Daniels, at Bethune Cookman University.
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Dr. Charles Daniels, Jr., the other cofounder at FUL, had a different story. He was a product of fatherlessness and witnessed his mother’s struggles as a single parent. As Daniels thought about his father and his father’s absence from his life, he took an unexpected approach: “I thought about the things he was going through that prevented him from remaining active in my life,” he says. “Then I said to myself, ‘What if someone had been there to help him?’ It might have made a tremendous difference.”
Through both of their experiences and narratives, they set a goal to make sure that no child would feel the way Charles felt, and founded Fathers’ Uplift. They wanted to ensure that all children experience the feelings associated with having an active father, even if they are not in the same country, the same city, the same state, and the same home.
