BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
An Ounce of Prevention
A social program that works. Where's the funding?
One of the strangest things about social policy in this country is that we know what works and yet don't do more of it. Take high-school dropout rates, which currently stand at roughly 50 percent for Latino and African-American males. The half who don't graduate (about a million kids a year) are often dooming themselves to a Hobbesian life that is "nasty, brutish and short." The wasted human potential is dooming the United States to second-class status as a global economic power.
We all know that the trouble starts early, with bored, unsupervised kids hanging out after school—the time when most crimes by young people are committed. Nearly 600,000 black males are currently serving time in prison, while only 40,000 will earn a college degree. Murders committed by black male teenagers are up 52 percent since 2002, which doesn't take us back to the bad old days of crack in the 1990s but is scary all the same.
Thousands of commendable small programs try to address this problem, but only one has achieved the scale to actually dent it. It's an institution you've heard of but probably know little about—in part because its facilities nowadays are only in the worst neighborhoods, a good hike from affluent areas. Last week I heard Denzel Washington and Cuba Gooding Jr. talk about how it changed their lives, and the same goes for Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Michael Jordan and Alex Rodriguez.
The 101-year-old Boys and Girls Clubs of America is an astonishing success story, second only to the black church as a source of stability in the inner city. It has more than doubled in size in the last decade, to 3,700 clubs in all 50 states (including 400 clubs in public housing projects and 200 on Native American reservations), serving 4.4 million young people after school. That's still less than a third of the estimated 15 million at-risk youth, but it's a model that actually holds the potential to end this national shame—if we as a country could only focus on it.
In case you haven't been in one for a while, these clubs are about a lot more than sports. In fact, Shaquille O'Neal recently donated $1 million with the stipulation that it not go for basketball, since, as he put it, there are only 400 jobs to aspire to in his line of work. The funds will instead be devoted in part to Project Learn, which engages kids between six and 18 in academically beneficial club activities that are also (usually) fun, helps them with their homework and guides them to graduation.
Denzel Washington told a story that stuck with me. He was about eight or nine years old and attending a club in Mount Vernon, N.Y., when a local politician came to visit. The young Denzel asked the politician a question, and afterward an adult from the club told him, "Hey, you're smart." He was stunned: "This was a totally new concept to me, that I could do something in the world." Washington remembers a few years later looking up at the pennants from all the universities attended by alumni of that club and thinking for the first time that he might actually go to college.
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Member Comments
Posted By: kbystrom @ 11/19/2007 4:54:14 PM
Comment: I supervise an after school program social/recreational/enrichment program for youth in grades 7-9 - not directly affiliated with BGC but a similar quality OST model. Attendance is growing - we have anywhere from 45-100 kids here most days. Most of our are kids on the fringe - they are clearly at a fork with two paths to choose from, and my staff and I are committed to ensuring they choose the right one. We offer transportation to a central site after school and activity bus service home. Youth get support they need from caring qualified adults, help with homework, and much needed physical exercise (known to improve not only physical but mental health). They can also choose from a variety of other modest offerings each day. We do not charge a participation fee, because most of our participants cannot afford it. With no revenue stream, we rely on community financial support. We KNOW what we do is making a dfference in this lives of these kids - it is evidenced by those who have been with us from the beginning who are now here as high schoolers in a volunteer capacity. It is evidenced by the sense of future they have...and a hopefulness for the future that wasn't present four or five years ago. Sounds like all is well, right? Well, think again. We are barely keeping our head above water financially. Although we have support from our generous business community, times our tough for them, and my program suffers indirectly as a result. It's not their fault - they have bills to pay too.
Interestingly, I can run a really good (not great like I'd like it to be) program for about $45,000 a school year - $45,000!!! That's all it would take to sustain what we have - not to grow mind you, but to simply sustain - to pay staff, to repair equipment, to purchase something new from time to time. With about 4000 kids passing through our doors annually, it doesn't take a genius to see what a good investment this is. We have just entered our fifth year - hanging on by a thread. Unfortunately these yearly financial struggles are wearing me down - it's getting harder and harder by the day.
What happened to our commitment to youth, families and communities? Why is is so difficult for our policymakers to see that it takes fewer resources to build capacity than it does to fund the alternatives (incarceration, public assistance etc. etc. etc.)? This is as important an investment as any I can think of, and the research is there to support it. Those of us in the trenches see it everyday...why does this have to be so hard?
Posted By: pbcfi @ 11/09/2007 10:32:14 PM
Comment: Great Article to call attention to all the good the Boys and Girls Clubs of America do.
As a board member of our local Club here in Wellington, Florida it makes me proud that my contribution is going in the right direction for all our Latch-Key kids in our midst. Maybe this story will stiimulate more local good citizens to join local club boards and contribute and get back more than they put in as I do.
Al Paglia
Wellington, Florida
Posted By: Pecos_Bill @ 11/02/2007 10:49:26 AM
Comment: The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have no place in Bush's America. We are at war, and for our own security we need to toss aside things like the Constitution AND the Bill of Rights, or the terrorists win!