Black Boys: An Endangered Species Hip Hop School Initiative

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - April 1, 2015 - PRLog -- While the "activists" are "acting," the politicians “politicking,” and everyone else scratching their heads trying to figure out a solution, the fix in the form of culture has always been right in front of our nose. Please help us to help these boys by building a Hip Hop school they actually enjoy attending. Once they realize what hit 'em they will be well educated by all objective standards.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson says, “people use their culture as a frame for understanding their world, and as a resource to do much of what they want. The same cultural patterns can frame different kinds of behavior, and by failing to explore culture at any depth, analysts miss a great opportunity to re-frame attitudes in a way that encourages desirable behavior and outcomes.”

Please see hyperlinks @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/young-black-males-trapped-by-rhetoric/2014/10/10/dcf95688-31e2-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html, http://gofund.me/plz2mo for an innovative initiative, which we hope you will lend your support given its urgency. Hip Hop is a mature art form, often the only one that Black children, teens and young men listen. We want to use Hip Hop culture as a catalyst to provide these Black boys, teens, and young men with demonstrable soft and hard skill sets as well as competencies in an affirming, creative but structured safe haven.

We are initially targeting Baltimore city. The success of the program measured through marked reduction in criminal justice contacts, truancy, delinquency; acquisition of job skills, and competencies of the first ‘class’ we recruit under our tutelage ought to provide quantifiable outcomes enabling us to use the successful Baltimore pilot as a national model we can roll out to other large urban areas.

We can fund this initiative for as little as $500,000 but need $1,000,000 for the reasons detailed in the proposal (http://gofund.me/plz2mo). We cannot hope to attract this level of funding without your enthusiastic support in promoting it, however. Our community has always been driven – literally and figuratively speaking – by charismatic figures. We are eliciting your support because you are one.

Ironically agency has always been typified by grass root movements and, more importantly, the people supporting these movements - not by charismatic figures, though. The contradiction between those two competing interests inevitably create tensions that often prevent initiatives such as ours from gaining traction necessary to realize fruition. So we wind up relying on failed K-12 models that do not capture (no pun intended) or serve the population with which we are targeting.

We need to help ourselves to help our boys. We rather see them coming into our homes through positive images on television not negative news pieces...