Men’s Empowerment

Introduction

Each year, more than a million kids will leave school without earning a high school diploma.  That's approximately 7,000 students every day of the academic year. In the state of Georgia, the dropout rate is roughly 57.8%.  Without a diploma, young men will be more likely to head down a path that leads to gang membership and activity, lower-paying jobs, poorer health, and the possible continuation of a cycle of poverty that creates immense challenges for families, neighborhoods, and communities.

For some young men, dropping out of school is the culmination of years of academic hurdles, missteps, and wrong turns. For others, the decision to drop out is a response to conflicting life pressures, the need to help support their family financially or the demands of caring for siblings or their own child. Dropping out is sometimes about students being bored and seeing no connection between academic life and "real" life. It's about young people feeling disconnected from their peers and from teachers and other adults at school. And it's about schools and communities having too few resources to meet the complex emotional and academic needs of their most vulnerable youth.

Over a lifetime, these dropouts typically earn less, suffer from poorer health as adults, and are more likely to wind up in jail than their diploma earning peers. It has been reported that violent juvenile crimes occur most frequently in the hours immediately following the end of school on school days, such as during the hours between 3-7 p.m.  Weekends, holidays, summer and/or any school vacation time, also can be risky for many high school students, as they are often alone and unsupervised, according to federal data. Boredom and disengagement are also some variables which encourage young men to go down the wrong path and most likely attract them to gang activities.  

Sometimes, schools overlook communities as a valuable resource in reaching young men who are at risk of joining gangs. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that, too often, gang-prevention and other programs in the school are not connected to what is going on in the streets. In today’s economic reality, where budget cuts have been reduced or entirely eliminated youth development programs, community partnerships (particularly those involved in tutoring, mentoring, life-skills training, increasing parental involvement and offering supervised recreational activities) must be a priority.

Thus, with the previously identified issues which impact our society and state’s growth economically and socially, it is pivotal for the creation of more collaborative partnerships with community stakeholders. 

Consequently, Not A Bad Apple Foundation was founded to eradicate the negative connotations in which our current society identifies our youth who create problems or cause trouble for others.  Specifically, a member of a group whose behavior reflects poorly on or negatively affects or influences the remainder of the group.  Many believe the best way to deal with Bad Apples is to take them out of the group as quickly as possible. Not A Bad Apple, Incorporation believes that there are no bad children or Apples, but children who need the continuum of the entire village embracing and raising a child.