Mayor Bloomberg Launches Public-Private Initiative to Support Minority Youth in NYC
Mayor Bloomberg Launches Public-Private Initiative to Support Minority Youth in NYC
New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has launched a three-year, $127.5 million initiative to support the advancement of young black and Latino men in the city, the Associated Press reports.
The Young Men's Initiative will address broad disparities that hinder the advancement of African American and Latino youth. Funding for the publicly administered project will include $30 million from Bloomberg's own family foundation, a matching $30 million from George Soros and the Open Society Foundations, and $67.5 million from the city itself.
The program will target approximately 315,000 African American and Latino men between the ages of 16 and 24 and will include over a dozen city agencies. To that end, the administration will place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes; revamp the Department of Probation and open five satellite offices in neighborhoods with large populations of at-risk youth; adopt new measures to hold schools accountable for the academic progress of African American and Latino youth; offer paid internships that will be tied to the attendance of remedial math and literacy classes; and offer fatherhood classes.
According to the mayor's office, several low-cost "common-sense" measures also will be introduced, including an executive order preventing city agencies from creating unnecessary barriers to city jobs for applicants with criminal convictions and a program that will help high school graduates obtain driver's licenses or state identification cards, which are often necessary for job applications.
"When we look at poverty rates, graduation rates, crime rates, and employment rates, one thing stands out: blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom and far too many are trapped in circumstances that are difficult to escape," said Bloomberg. "Even though skin color in America no longer determines a child's fate — sadly, it tells us more about a child's future than it should. And so this morning, we are confronting these facts head-on, not to lament them but to change them, and to ensure that 'equal opportunity' is not an abstract notion but an everyday reality, for all New Yorkers."
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