A juvenile court judge in Vinton County, Ohio recently penned a guest column in The Cincinnati Enquirer. The topic? YouthBuild.
If you are unfamiliar with the group, YouthBuild is a national youth and community development program that works with 16-24 year old, low income youths. Education is the baseline of their efforts, a vital topic in the modern day. Youngsters work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas, learn job skills while serving their communities by building affordable housing.
YouthBuild boasts 273 programs across the country. 21,000 units of affordable housing have been built since 1994 by 110,000 participants in the program. Now almost half of those programs across the U.S., 121 of them to be exact, have just lost their primary funding due to Department of Labor cuts.
Education is vital, it is one of the most important subjects on the table in modern society. Judge Grillo wrote a much needed call to arms about the direct correlation between education and quality of life:
Here in Southeastern Ohio, young people without a diploma, skills or GED have little to no hope for becoming useful adults. We have a population of young people without skills going on the dole, becoming takers rather than givers. Without an education our young people are just drifting, and as a judge, I know that society pays a high price.
I’ve seen young people who have committed serious crimes straighten themselves up through YouthBuild.
And I see young parents breaking a cycle of poverty by getting training and building a future for their families. One young woman got pregnant at 15 and struggled to stay in school after her daughter was born. She eventually dropped out and tried homeschooling, but nothing stuck until she enrolled in YouthBuild. Now 19 and head of her household, she has graduated from high school, completed nurse’s aide training and is enrolled at a state university.
While Southeastern Ohio is in a bind they are not alone. 121 Youthbuild Programs nation wide have just lost funding. Another victim of the drive to make short term savings shortchanging our future. Judge Grillo sums it up nicely:
Cutting funding for YouthBuild is short-sighted. We should be front-loading the social services system with educational opportunities and hope instead of back-loading it, only providing services when people fail and have nowhere else to turn.
Programs like YouthBuild are major weapons in the battle for juvenile justice. The combination of education and job skill training can be a potent weapon against the allure of crime. Additionally, it is far less expensive to taxpayers in the long run to focus on preventative and rehabilitative measures such as these.
It’s all about the future. Will we help the next generation realize their potential or will be allow their opportunities to recede into the distance.
As William Butler Yeats once said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
Image Source: YouthBuild Philly
