"The Concrete Jungle"

Join the Movement. Start Your Own Rites of Passage Today!
Adolescent males of color across the nation are facing the battle of their young lives as the lore of street life paints illusions of fast money, instant gratification, and popularity. Our male students particularly are in the process of making the profound decision whether to embark on the educational journey that we the adults claim will culminate in a content life filled with countless opportunities or merely surviving their present situation, avoiding long term tasks for the sake of enjoying the moment, and succumbing to pop culture and the tragedies and triumphs that accompany such a lifestyle. With Black and Latino boys simultaneously displaying the lowest graduation rates and the highest incarceration rates, we can no longer afford to leave our boys to "freestyle" manhood and carve out their own paths. To reroute the direction of the continually spreading achievement gap and school to prison pipeline, my calling in the larger goal of reclaiming our boys of color is to overwhelm black and Latino communities with Rites of Passage programs and other positive mentoring experiences so to snatch "manhood training" out of the hands of local gangs and hypothetical heroes created by mass media and replace those strong influences with voices of the true warriors of the concrete jungle (men of color who have been raised in like communities, toiled through this educational/social experiment, and survived).