John Kerry - Speaks Out About "YouthBuild and AmeriCorps"

[angrydemocrat]

Back in 1978, a woman named Dorothy Stoneman, along with a group of local teenagers, set out to restore a tenement house in Harlem to serve as a shelter for homeless people. They wound up building much more than a house, for it proved to be a first step toward what we know today as the YouthBuild initiative, a public-private partnership that employs at-risk youth in the construction of new housing for low-income and homeless people at two hundred sites in forty-four states. I've been involved with YouthBuild as an occasional participant and a regular advocate for about ten years, and every time I visit one of its work sites my faith in the regenerative power of service is renewed. During the past ten years, twenty-five thousand young people have built over ten-thousand units of low income housing- in the aggregate, a small city of big dreams realized.

YouthBuild is open to unemployed young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. Most of them have been in some kind of trouble. Some of them are still struggling to stay in school, and they alternate weeks on the job with weeks in the classroom. They are turning their own lives around as they turn around neighborhoods by building new housing. While they work on carpentry or masonry they also work towards a diploma, a certificate in a useful construction skill, or a job. YouthBuild kids take weekly classes in how to manage time effectively, develop a career plan, and handle job interviews. At work sites, they get close supervision and training from high-quality instructors, often union journeymen.

During the past decade YouthBuild has operated in partnership with AmeriCorps national service program, the domestic Peace Corps begun under President Clinton to give young people a chance to earn college scholarships in exchange for a year or two of service to the community in a broad range of critical tasks, from conservation to crime prevention to literacy and home health care. The partnership means that many YouthBuild participants are now able to go on to college.

I'm sure many YouthBuild participants and alumni were as gratified as I was when President Bush made a national service a central theme of his State of the Union Address in 2002, calling, among other things, for doubling the size of the size of AmeriCorps. I'm sure they were equally disappointed when this pledge was abandoned, and Congressional Republicans instead cut AmeriCorps in half, actually shutting the program down for a while despite a record number of applications from young people answering the president's call.

If we as country cannot see the value of initiatives like YouthBuild-a value measured not just in the dollars and cents of new housing stock and higher property values but in lives saved, crimes uncommitted, and prison cells unoccupied- we are incapable of intelligently allocating resources at all.