What About What’s Right With Youth?

A young black student is at the computer in the office of the Cal State Northridge Dubois-Hamer Institute, creating a newsletter to distribute at high schools. As coordinator of a new Saturday academy in South-Central Los Angeles, he is visiting high schools with predominantly black and Hispanic populations to recruit youths to participate. Seventeen high schools and seven churches with large youth programs have been identified for visits.

This student, OG McClinton, is constantly interrupted by students coming into the office to inquire about a scheduled “study jam.” This is but one of a number of intervention activities he has organized as part of a freshman retention effort aimed at reducing the numbers being “stopped out” because they do not meet the requirements of Executive Order 665 from the Cal State University chancellor’s office, which allows only one year for remediation. His energetic attention belies the fact that he just returned early this morning from a black student leadership conference in Washington, D.C., where he presented a paper as president of CSUN’s Black Student Union.

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At an adjacent desk, student T Fox is putting finishing touches on a presentation he will make to Cal State trustees on remediation and graduation rates of African American students. This is one of several presentations he has made to this body and represents only a fraction of the activity he has spearheaded in the wake of the remediation mandate. Fox also visits San Fernando Valley middle and high schools weekly to meet with African American students to discuss potential blocks to their productivity and to encourage them to prepare for college so they will avoid having to take remedial courses.

Add to this his collaboration with Advocates for Valley African American Students (AVAAS), an aggressively proactive parents council, and you still have only part of this young man’s scheduled commitments. Today, even with a major presentation in front of him, Fox is fielding phone calls about another project. He is coordinator of a mathematics and writing Saturday academy at CSUN that serves more than 40 Valley high school African American students. The callers are parents who want their children to get the next available spot in the program.

At both sites, the Saturday academies provide a strong academic focus and nurture in students a sense of their responsibility to be advocates for academic excellence, for themselves and for their peers. The idea for the program was brought to the DuBois-Hamer Institute by Tobias Brookins and Kimberly Prince, two young people in the community who co-direct a Pacoima-based nonprofit, TOYS--Tapping Opportunities for Youth to Succeed. They envisioned a Saturday program that honored the potential of at-risk students and supported their academic survival, development and success through academic enhancement.

But student activism is not limited to just the academic. In the same office, another student is coordinating a food giveaway. This is part of a new program, instituted by CSUN student Thaydiana Wallace, and called Bread of Life Distribution (BOLD), that provides food for needy students. It operates from the Black House, a campus facility operated by the Pan African Studies Department and Black Students Union.

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Working under the umbrella of the DuBois-Hamer Institute, these students are experiencing the value of networking and collaboration in building programs that are successful without large infusions of money. They are experiencing what it means to be human capital and to give back to their communities. Each--and many others I could name--deserves recognition. Their leadership addresses issues that affect students of color struggling to succeed at the university level and beyond.

Unfortunately, students who make this level of commitment to the community are not given the visibility they merit. They do not make headlines. Their stories are not considered sufficiently dramatic. Yet they are providing something young people sorely need: examples that the process of becoming our future begins in the present.

The young and the not so young need exposure to role models like OG McClinton, T Fox, Tobias Brookins, Kimberly Prince and Thaydiana Wallace. It might shift the focus away from what our youth are not doing, or what they are doing that is not productive, to how they are leading the way.