Success on the Ground | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] i'm bob woodson the president and founder of the woodson center and i want to thank harlan crowe and and the staff and everybody in aei and for sponsoring us i'm the president and founder of the woodson center and i'm joined by my grassroots leaders from around the country we have a cadre of about 10. makita lattimore who's a village initiative in kansas city gwen brown from washington d.c melvin anderson southern dreams in mississippi jesse turner from arkansas and my staff curtis watkins is here and beth feely is over here and anthony bradley is a new scholar of our new president we want to welcome you because we disagree with the doctrine of our opposition groups we tend to dismiss very important principles and tactics if we can extract the principles and tactics from the doctrine it may be useful for them to to apply to our own doctrine and produce effective results in the cultural war the left has been very effective in public marketing of their destructive message we have not we have not had a ground game and i think about in terms of how do we market these principles i think of ralph nader where ralph nader wanted to convince the congress that we should regulate automobiles he came to the hearing with her blood-stained wrinkled fender of a pinto and the weeping parents of a 16-year-old who was killed in a crash and then he presented his data people on the other side had four white guys in suits with charts offering data and so we believe that if we are to win this cultural war we have got to emphasize the importance of not just the message but the messengers conservative emphasis on lower taxes strong defense and limited government are important but insufficient and compatible that we are in a cultural war and values transmitted are transmitted not by just offering free downloads on the constitution but it is through civic institutions in these communities so the woodson center has over the years supported institutions within communities suffering the problem for example chuck swindell said that i am convinced that life is 10 of what happens to me and ninety percent of how i react if we are in charge of our attitudes it is more important than the past than education than circumstances than failures and success than other people think or say or do it is more important than appearance giftedness or skill it will make or break a church a company and a country so that the values of people are transmitted through the institutions what the national what the woodson center has done over the years and it's the foundation of what we do is that we use the the story of joseph from genesis joseph as you know was from a dysfunctional hebrew family he could he uh told his his father and his son and his brothers that he saw him bow down to him because he had these dreams and you know he was sold into slavery through the ishmaelites who were slave traders in egypt and he found himself in a house of potiphar as a slave but he became the best slave in the house of potiphar and he was very handsome and potiphar's wife lusted for him but he was had horizontal integrity and vertical integrity he knew it was a sin against his god but also a violation of trust and so she sent all the servants out and came on to him and he resisted and she accused him of falsely of rape and he was in prison where he became the best prisoner and he languished there for many years and then when pharaoh had dreams that none of his experts his phds or mbas from harvard could interpret they um they remembered this 31 year old in hebrew inmate and they brought him up before pharaoh and he refused to bow to pharaoh so pharaoh knew that he had integrity and he told him i understand you can interpret dreams he said no i am only the message i'm the vessel he had become humbled through all his experience and he said there'll be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine save of 20 first flat tax and appoint an overseer and and and and he appointed joseph the overseer and the importance of this paradigm uh as a foundation what we do is that if if joseph had become bitter and complained and remained unfaithful to his god we wouldn't have known about him eventually he was able to propose remedies that saved and rescued the egyptians that enslaved him and the families that betrayed him and so the joseph is a powerful metaphor for what we at the woodson center but if it wasn't for the good pharaoh a good pharaoh is a rich and powerful person who's capable of dreaming bad dreams in good times and seeing beyond their wealth and influence but also the ability to look reach across racial and ethnic lines to empower a 31 year old uneducated hebrew inmate and elevate him to power and so the woodson center has over its 40 years used gone into low-income high-crime communities and look for two types of josephs they're joseph's like in in genesis who are in poverty but not of poverty these are the people if you say 70 percent of families in low-income communities are raising children that are dysfunctional it means 30 are not those are the joseph so we go into these communities and look for the josephs that are in poverty but not of poverty and then there's the second types of joseph that had fallen they became predators they became a a dysfunctional but through god's grace they became transformed and redeemed and therefore they became powerful witnesses to others in their environment that redemption is possible so what the woodson center has done over the course of its 40 years is that we have promoted remedies from within the community by going in there and really listening to the real experts about how to reduce poverty and they become our message if we want to convince people of the soundness and usefulness of our values and our principles we're not going to do this by issuing white papers or or giving free downloads on the constitution we must partner with the joseph of this world whose actions embody those principles that we believe because people are persuaded we believe that you confront an argument with an experience and a witness is more powerful than an advocate and so i'm delighted to be able to introduce you to some examples of our joseph we have about 2 500 grassroots leaders whose lives we've touched in 39 states different racial and ethnic groups and they are the real experts as to how to transform and redeem not only individuals but whole communities and we have endless examples of of how that transformation occurs but the qualities that make these men and women effective also makes them invisible because they're not whining and complaining they're not protesting they're not looking for you you've got to be like a geiger counter and go in and look for them and then once we do we need to bring the good pharaohs we're like a venture capitalist without capital but we also know that grassroots leaders as as entrepreneurs tend to be poor bookkeepers and what venture capitalists bring to the table is not just capital but also managerial expertise so we know an entrepreneurial event grows from a an action a simple entrepreneurial event until it becomes a fortune 500 company so what we try to do at the woodson center is take the skills and experiences of our in our market economy and apply it to the social economy recognizing that as i've often said that entrepreneurs tend to be also c students not a students a students come back to universities and teach see students in dao and so i'd like to without further ado i have some of my colleagues from around the country who have been shining examples of joseph's that to me are the building blocks of a restored america you cannot generalize about poor people as a previous parent this there's three categories of people there are some people who just broke their values are intact and all they need they use welfare and assistance as it should be as an ambulance service not as a transportation system the second group as the previous panel said there if you get remove the perverse incentives for being independent and take the perverse incentives then they will thrive but the third group that is most troubling and of the cause are the people who are poor because of the choices that they make and the chances that they take theirs is a moral and spiritual crisis giving resources to them without the precondition of redemption is injuring them with the helping hand and so what our grassroots leaders from around the country specialize in category three of first recognize that people must be transformed and redeemed as a precondition of outside assistance health so without any further ado i'd like to ask our first panelist john ponder john is from las vegas and nevada and he has his group for hope for prisoners john we can tell a powerful story of being redeemed from prison where he was facing many years for god touched his life and as a consequence he was able to establish an organization that touched the lives of thousands so i'll ask john and i'll introduce other panelists sure thank you thank you bob uh good morning everyone i counted a privilege to be here what an amazing time we've had over these past couple of days so thoroughly thoroughly and enjoyed it so uh by way of introduction john ponder founder and ceo of hope for prisoners and what our organization does is we work with men women and young adults that are exiting different arenas of our judicial system so we work with people are coming home from state or federal prisons city county jails drug rehabs halfway houses transitional facilities and the likes and what we do is provide the support of services to help the men and women that are returning back to our community not only get acclimated back into workplaces but we make sure there's mechanisms in place through partnerships that we built up with employers that once they get inside those workplaces they're going to be afforded every opportunity to thrive and be able to grow and afford it every opportunity to succeed we address the needs for them to get acclimated back into the family which has been a missed mark in re-entry since forever it's like no one's ever paid particularly close attention to the men and women that are coming home that they need to get reacclimated back into their family wives and husbands and particularly to get reintegrated with their children so we work as best as we possibly can to ensure that there's a mechanism in place to help with the family reunification component because everybody in this room can attest to the fact that if the family life is not right if the home life is not right then everything else in the world has a tendency to fall apart and then on the back end of the process because there's a long-term 18-month post-release component that we have again we want to do everything we can to ensure we're helping them to be stand-up leaders in the community with an overall goal of them never ever ever reoffended again so the organization was birthed out of my own personal experiences that was a guy who uh grew up in the streets of new york coming out of the different uh juvenile systems since the 10 the age of 12 years old have been in and out of every juvenile system in the state of new york multiple jails prisons uh in in the state of new york in the state of nevada uh and then you know 32 years later i found myself in the maximum security united states federal penitentiary behind 50-foot walls so coming in and out of the system all that time i had made a whole lot of mistakes trying to get life right but i was violating going right back to the prison system until one day for me i stood in the prison cell looked back over the last 30 some odd years of my life and would have this unshakable sense that i know that i know that i know that life has to be more than what it was about i was living if somehow something was different and i stood in that prison cell i asked god to step in and turn my life around at 100 percent he did and when my life and when my life got turned around spent every wake a moment of time in prison uh trying to just understand um you know how to transform my life and turn my life around and this is when this mantle got dropped on on my shoulders to turn right back around and help the other men and women who were engaged in bonds to the same things that i was in bonza's do to do everything i possibly can to untie them from those things and help to escort them up to the next level of life let me say john that that you did something most unusual in terms of partnership with hopefully tell us about the you how many inmates uh ex-offenders have you touched and what was been the relationship with the police we heard something about antagonism tell us about that absolutely 100 since 2009 we've had the great privilege to work with over 4 700 men and women who have been through our process of those 4 700 individuals we had the great privilege to work with according to the university of nevada las vegas criminal justice department who came in and asked us to move out of the way and i wanted to see how good they were we were doing and according to them uh they they determined that more than 74 percent of our folks were able to gain sustainable wage employment right 25 percent of those were full-time employed within 17 days after completing our process and of those folks that we've had the great privilege to work with what the university of nevada las vegas had determined was that only six percent of those individuals return back to the prison system it is a number that thank you is a number that we're extremely extremely proud of but uh to be quite honest with you we're not satisfied because my desire is not to lose anyone but when people ask me all the time well how are you getting those kind of numbers 75 percent of people who are considered hard to stop the higher by every stretch of the statistic they should be back on the prison yard but not only not only have they not gone back they're living levels of life today that most people only dream of and that's how it is that we are changing the face of reentry so how do we do that we know that it's the training because one of the things that we've learned was that the vast majority from this people from this segment of the population they really do want to change they have no idea how to do it so for so long we've been telling people from this segment of the population to come home and be a productive member in the community they have no idea what that looks like or we tell people to come home and get a job and some people from this segment of the population have never worked a legitimate job a day before in their life or we tell men to come home and take their rightful positions in the home as the as the fathers and the husbands that god created and to be and they have no healthy reference point of what it might look like in here so we take them through that very intensive training process on things not only to be able to to get a good job but how do we maintain that job and how could we lay down a foundation to help people build up this brand new life to where they never ever ever reoffend again so it's the the it's the training it's the intensive case management and it's the mentoring if you ask anybody who has ever achieved any significant level of success in life how did you get there how did you get to where you are in life if that person's completely honest with you they're going to admit that they did not get there on their own they had people that were in their life guiding directing coaching push pulling dragging uh you know sometimes kicking in the butt every single step of the way we've had the privilege to train up over 600 men and women who have their boots on the ground that serve as mentors now these mentors are pastors and leaders from churches across southern nevada to leaders in other houses of faith to business owners and business leaders to school teachers right down to the las vegas metropolitan police department and watch the smile on my face where the sheriff has given us an army of volunteer police officers that are serving as mentors never before in the history of reentry nowhere on this planet has law enforcement gotten this involved in mentoring and training people coming home from the prison center system and if you think about it that is causing such a win-win on both sides of the equations in our community because you think about it if we're trying to get men and women returning back to the community get out in the community and never reoffend again in order for us to be able to do that we have to instill in them a a love and appreciation and build character and a respect for the rules and regulations of our land we found that something magical happened when we brought them in relationship with the men and women who are upholding the law and if you flip the coin around to the other side what that partnership is doing is this forcing law enforcement across across the land to to do the things that they said around and talked about all all the time right to view people that are coming home from the prison system who are truly truly fighting for a second chance and help them to view them from a whole nother set of of lenses it's something that other police departments across the country have uh asked us to replicate and the thing that we we love about this and i'm going to put this in here i'm going to shut up if you look across this country right there's a disruption between law enforcement and communities right and people do not trust police they don't trust police you know why they don't trust police because they're not in relationship with police and what relationship could you ever establish trust unless there's a life rubbing up against life in the spirit of complete transparency that that we have more in common than we have difference right and either that transparency builds the relationship and out of the relationship then trust will be established and before introducing ron i know from experience that 40 percent of john's mentors of inmates are police officers and as a consequence the negative violent encounters between police and civilians is dramatically down in las vegas because of this relationship but also john mimicks that that the the the the counselors that surrounded him was the prosecutor the prosecutor and the police officer arrested him and the judge who sentenced him that's his team that's the level of innovation that occurs in these communities so thanks our next presenter is ron anderson and ron is project reclaimed from mindan louisiana ron created a project with claim out of his own experience of rise from poverty project mccain youth leadership institute operates with the goal of helping our youth develop and demonstrate positive leadership skills in their home schools and in communities ron is one of our a-team members well thank you mr woodson it's pleasure to be here as was previously mentioned my name is ron anderson operate the project reclaim program in menden louisiana which you've probably never heard of it's a small town about 30 miles east of shreveport and what we endeavor to do in project reclaim is we work with youth primarily in poverty and a core feature of what we do is leadership training i'd done some leadership training for our parish school system and i noticed something i noticed that most of the young people that came there they drove and then when they emerged from their vehicles they had on leather jackets and it was obvious as they traversed through my training and the other trainings that were going on on the campus of lsu and shreveport that they were well versed in education they were a and b students well i had a contention we need leadership training for kids that don't ever get selected for leadership training so we focus on kids that come from dire circumstances they need to learn to be positive and effective leaders in their homes schools and communities as well so i want those kids that come from high crime neighborhoods single parent homes free and reduced lunch which means poverty uh they maybe have a tendency to be disrespectful or disruptive in the academic setting and they just may need a little bit of guidance and support and we take those individuals and we enroll them in our program and when i go to the schools and the churches and community organizations to recruit our participants and they give me kids that meet the criteria that i just mentioned to you when we meet those kids and introduce them and their parents into our programs and we give the parents the application to enroll them the cover page on that application says congratulations your child has been nominated to be a part of a leadership academy because somebody somewhere sees something in them so we don't operate from a deficit perspective with young people that we work with even though they come from dire circumstances we look at them from a positive perspective case being because the man sitting before you the prediction for me was that i would die in the streets or i'd end up in our famed angola state penitentiary and as a teenager and a young adult i believe that and i'm well over half a hundred years old now i don't know if you can tell but [Laughter] i still can't give voice to how it feels that that kind of destiny is something that is ordained for you preordained for you i still can't tell you how it feels to think that your destiny is that bleak and that cold and that hellish so i want those kids that other people say ron you take them i can't work with them well year after year we found that this happens when we bring those kids into our embrace and we enroll families as well and i'm fond of saying we don't just enroll the kids because as you mentioned if you don't impact the dynamic of that household you're spitting in the wind something has to happen within that dynamic in that household so we have parental engagement parental education activities and we engage those kids and year after year our outcomes are these we want our kids to remain in school promote from one grade level to the next stay out of involvement in juvenile court so they don't end up in your hair and we want them not becoming parents before they equip they are equipped for such a crucial role and year after year we're either at 100 percent of the high 90s in each of those areas that i mentioned to you we were rated as one of the 10 outstanding juvenile delinquency prevention programs in the state of louisiana and when we were funded by the office of juvenile justice even though we had sterling outcomes like that they took our funding and when i inquired as to why they said well we're going to take that funding and we're going to put it in juvenile secure facilities someone somewhere had an idea and as curtis watkins says it's a policy decision they had an idea that we don't want to invest in prevention we want to do something with them when we lock them up well this is what i did i continued project reclaim as a volunteer wasn't getting paid but i wasn't going to cut bait and run because we didn't have that funding i retooled what we did and i kept those kids and i embraced and then over the years we're able to get funding to continue to stabilize us because i recognize this as there were people that saw things in a blackboard from the projects with no heat no new clothes one meal a day monday through friday at school which means today he would go hungry and tomorrow he would go hungry and then you'd learn how to forget about eating if i could emerge from that circumstance then i feel obligated to reach out to other young people that are going through similar circumstances and as i previously mentioned we don't look at the young people that we serve from a position of deficit we look at them from their strengths every young person and we enroll from third grade and we grow them until they matriculate into college or vo tech or the military or they become gainfully employed but if you're a third grader an eighth grade eight-year-old student in our program you are called mr or ms and my moniker is mr ron and i'll take that gratefully because we want them to know this as a mention to your honor when i was sitting inside of yesterday we had just a wonderful conversation the reason we're turning project reclaim is because we've got to reclaim some of those values and virtues that sustained us like hard work respect respect for others character and something i heard mentioned on this stage from another panel a sense of communal responsibility our kids are engaged in giving back to the community because i had this hair brained idea that if they feel a part of the fabric of the community maybe they'll want to protect it maybe they'll want to protect it and keep it whole so i do what i do out of a sense you do a passion of having been there thank god i wasn't behind those 50-foot walls but i came close i came close but i'm thankful every day for people that saw in a young black boy things that he didn't see that he was blind to himself and i'm obligated to give back out of a sense of service to the people that instilled that in me good let me say that we we met ron because one of our good pharaohs who was one of our financial supporters read about the woodson principles and so i know someone who meets that standard and he introduced us to ron and as a consequence we came in and provide ryan with some training and that man turned over a 5 000 square foot building so ron could move his program out of his home into a facility and i'd be right ron that's very correct wife is eternally grateful [Laughter] and that's the kind of role that the woodson center plays uh with our joseph's we try to connect them with pharaohs and we'll talk more about that but our next presenter is betty tyler and marvelous works inc jackson mississippi marvelous works mission is to reduce incidents associated with health and behavioral disparities affecting communities and disappointing we affectionately call him miss betty and i wish she would share a little about her personal journey too okay okay um again good morning everybody and thank you mr woodson as he said i am better tyler and i am the founder and director of a small non-profit organization in jackson mississippi the name is marvelous work with the two elves and that's the marvel's the way it's spelt in the bible coming from psalms 139 14 for i am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous about works and that my soul knoweth right well i had to know that in order for me to transition from the place of disparity in my own personal life that i was i've been working in this field for the last 30 years i've been in recovery from substance abuse for the last 31 and a half years and when i was in the treatment center i was so angry and and uh full of all of the fear and confusion all the other things associated with an addiction and mine especially because i graduated in the top five percentile of my class presidential student body president of the national honor society the president of the spanish club cheerleader some of the most likely to succeed type of things and i ended up in drug addiction so when i got there i was angry and about to get thrown out of the treatment center there was this one doctor he came to me and he asked me he says betty how can we help you and that compassion i heard that and i felt it because underneath all that anger it really wasn't anger it was fear shame guilt humiliation demoralization all those other things and i mastered with the superficial anger because you couldn't see just how vulnerable and pitiful i was so after completing treatment and i remember this we were in treatment and um the tv station came in and they interviewed everybody and of course our natural trying to stay back and didn't want to be in front of a camera into that thing and all of the ladies that they interviewed all of them said that they wanted to be counselors well in my mind i didn't want to be a counselor i just didn't want to do drugs anymore and i wanted to figure out how to get my money back i didn't want any party and fortunately i was the one that became a counselor and i started with this agency and i went into the uh prison system and i kind of worked my way up through the ranks from starting out as secretary into outreach worker council primary council and manager of the program clinical supervisor those kind of things but when i went into the prison system and i had this i never forgot that question that the doctor asked me in the treatment center so that was the modality that i determined that i would reach these female offenders and one of the warden has spoken to me and she said better you they like you so well and they trust you but you don't have to tell them all that you don't have to tell them about yourself and i said but i do i do have to be transparent because that transparency is what gained that trust and also i had to be a witness because if they can see this pitiful something flourished from the cocoon of pain and desperation into a flourishing of a butterfly then they can do that too so they once began to buy into it and after i um left the prison system and continued to do the work in other organizations in different positions then they actually had me to come back and train their staff because their staff was not able to connect with the offenders the way they thought that i had effectively connected with them and which i had so i went back and did a lot of staff development training and those kinds of things and in my work i um decided to do marvelous work because once those females left the system they talked about all the data associated with the recivism and all those kinds of things but it wasn't focusing on the inmates that didn't necessarily not reoffend but was not re-arrested or didn't come back into the system because that whole group was out there they were still stagnated they was caught up in that mindset of prison mentality they were not elevating they were not surviving but they were not reoffending and coming back into the prison so that's when i decided i need to be a catalyst for that and um as mr woodson talked about a lot of these grassroots programs and projects we don't have the money or the managerial skills i had clinical skills you know i had those so i decided what i would do would be a catalyst i'll go to mdoc the deputy commissioner and i would talk to them i said look this is what allow me to come in and do this needs assessment and then once i identify those needs then i go back and let me allow me to come in and develop a curriculum something that's going to bridge this that's going to assist in not only decreasing the recidivism numbers but increasing the sustainability the responsible lifestyle and the mental health the holistic wellness approach because women in the female offender is my target population that's because the same as mr anderson and mr ron and um john yes it's just by the grace of god that i didn't do prison time it was not because i didn't do the things or some of the acts that a lot of the females actually that i was serving they were in prison during time for some of the actual crimes that i committed and it was about grace of god that i just didn't do i wasn't in prison so you know guys say you know no i didn't clean you up to sit back and cross your legs you piece of dirt you get busy and those are the spiritual principle that the marvelous work is founded on first we go within and and you know we teach us resilience and we get them back to the place that they need to be addressing those deficits females are affected by so many issues they are traumatized i was traumatized there's so much traumatization and not the drug addiction not the criminality but just being the female in general a lot of the females come in have lost their children and they attempt to regain custody of the children but as mr plummer said they don't still know how to be a parent they know how to they don't know how to raise the kids we can walk them through all the processes all the way through child protective services stand with them in court get those parental rights reinstated and then within six to nine months those excuse me those kids are gone again because they did don't have the fundamental training to be a mother the nurturing is not there they brought children and most of them bore children during active addiction therefore they didn't have time to do a nurturing abundance with their children so you know we we do all that and on the back end once they become self-sustainable that responsible citizen then you have a chore and that's the gear bag that's altruism that's a strong part of our curriculum of our program no matter what the pool of populations is whether the youth the teens we call them at promise a lot of people determine at risk kids we call them at promise at the woodson center whatever population we serve ultimately when we start the project ultimately you will give back in some fashion therefore back to what i was initially saying i didn't have to have a lot of overhead i didn't have to have a facility there are so many in-kind donations out there that provide not only the facility transportation for me to take them on their trips and even the population themselves they have the community stupid with the summer youth program the ed promise kids all over the city of jackson all i need to do is go in with my services get the kids and my women the female the offenders as a buy union as a buy into what it is that i'm saying go within yourself stand up in yourself become the person that god created you to be and then give back so therefore also i don't have to have this complete large staff because guess what once they're trained to give back then they take the torch and go on thank you and our next person is sylvia bennett stones he's the woodson center's national director of voices of black mothers united a project of the woodson center um internet powers black mothers who've lost children to homicide and sylvia will give a little her background and just what we've done yes good morning everyone and thank you mr wilson and again i would echo this has been a lovely lovely program i've learned so much and met so many wonderful people again i'm sylvia bennett stone director of voices of black mothers united i tell everyone i live in alabama i'm from long island new york i live in alabama and work at a dc with the woodson center so i'm a little bit all over the place and i love it to share a little of my background in alabama i have a grassroot organization non-profit where we work with juvenile offenders in since 1997 we utilized the court system um got the offenders and gave them programs instead of incarceration and we have to change the heart of that young person opposed to locking them up and and nothing ever changes they're still gonna get out and go home and be hungry they're still going to go out go home and be raped all of those things but opposed to them going into incarceration we work with them outside of it and i thought i was doing all the right things single mother raising two children and raising bonus children because of my children bringing children home and all of the above of of what is traditional in a black family in a black neighborhood we are the leaders in our communities like mothers we are the candy lady we are the confidants we are the disciplinary you know in our day you just didn't do things and thought you was going to get away with it because the neighbors saw you yes and the neighbor disciplined you so that's what i strive to be and just a good christian woman raising my children with christian values in the church july 4th 2004 my daughter her girlfriend went to the gas station get gas and the girls were caught in a crossfire of guys shooting at each other the bullet went through my daughter's body enlarged in the heart of her girlfriend and both girls died i got the phone call and thought no there's absolutely no way not my child and we all say that not my child but it's happening so prevalent now that we no longer can just really say that we have to be active in making some changes but anyway i was met at the hospital and it was my child and things as i once knew it was never the same my whole life changed and i had to figure out the new normal in our lives in doing that i i there's no road map you know when when we carry a child as women nine months there are people that share oh this is going to be the kick part this is going to be this part so you have people that share that road map with you and then you have the doctors that tell you about labor but you don't have anyone to tell you how to survive burying your child so in in more of that i went on the search to figure it out but on this search i found there was thousands of other mothers just like myself trying to figure it out the one thing i knew for sure and that was to hang on to the promises and the word of god i knew that that's what saved me from dying statistically 25 of parents died within the first 10 years of losing a child 92 of marriages failed 92 so you're destroying a whole community families you just don't take that child you take it all the devil comes in to steal kill and destroy and that's what this thing is designed to do but we had to come together and figure this out what do we do and being a grassroot member of the whitson center i came on a call one day and mr woodson said where you been you know and i shared mr woodson i lost my daughter but the thing i'm mostly frustrated is with is that people don't want to hear about the thousands of black cases lives that are being lost and bringing real solutions to our communities they only want to go up in arms if there's a cop killing and those are very few and far between compared to 10 000 of our children dying on the street and a lot of them are innocently dying being caught in crossfires such as my daughter crystal mr whitson said you know what you're absolutely right and we need to give you all a national platform and was born out of that my gratefulness to the woodson center to mr whitson to give 22 mothers in 22 states with thousands of mothers that they mentor and they help through the process the voice to stand together but not only are we speaking for our children we're speaking up for our communities we're saying things that people don't want to say out loud we were the first ones to say we do not support defunding your police because see when you when you paid black lives matter down the street where black lives don't live and they can't see that they matter but you put a hundred thousand dollars in a road but you won't put that money into a job that's a problem we put people over policies we work with the people in the community i have mothers who's lost their children and know that the necessity of changing the lives of these young men and women who are feeling so hopeless in their lives that they will willingly and openly take the life of someone else we have these mothers who go into the prisons mentor love and forgive those excuse me they can forgive them and if we can do that we can band together make these changes if i can forgive the one that killed my crystal joy then why can't we come together as a people not as black not as white but as a people to love on our communities and then love the people to make those changes ladies and gentlemen you're you're witnessing and listening to the testimony of america's new patriots they are antibodies and collectively they represent a an immune system that's why it's important to prove support those within those communities that healing has to occur within we must take race off of the table we don't argue it off the table we must replace it with something of superior value and the salvation of our children represents that superior value sylvia has come together with two other groups of mothers yes and that is a mother some silicon valley were losing their children six times the national average teenagers in silicon valley among affluent white pen in appalachia the leading cause of death is prescription drugs sylvia we sponsored a consortium of those mothers moderated by frank luntz where they shared the common ground that they they occupy because the i'm sorry so we go ahead what we did we showed the world that we're all bound by the same pain we may have lost our children under different circumstances but they all are woven together in some way or another the opioids can lead to violence the suicide can lead to violence because of a mental health issue i have one mother in south carolina her son had mental health issues and was threatening to commit suicide she called the police and this is how we can change things and i'm going to share this story this is how we can change things she called the police the police handled her son as a criminal when they were when they approached him he ended up shooting himself in the head in her driveway in front of the police but she just didn't let that happen to another mother she went back to that police officer that handled it wrong got together with him and wrote up how to handle these mental health issues now that police officer is training other police officers [Applause] this is the work that that we have to do it's not a matter of choice it's a have to and these are mothers from all walks of life all levels of income right but we're bound by the same pain we have time for questions uh yes not not really a question i just feel compelled to comment to say you all are doing god's work and don't please don't stop and in my sort life i've experienced in one way or other um many of the things that you all have expressed that you're working on in in such a passionate and important way you are as i suggested on my panel yesterday sprinkling that special sauce those ingredients for that special sauce that's going to uplift not just black americans but all americans who are disadvantaged in this country and i appreciate what you're doing i work at the national level to try to get government out of your way i try i try to get corporate america out of your way and and to prevent those unintended consequences that they create for our communities but by doing that i could create a void and if you're not there to fill that void to keep working on the ingredients and putting the ingredients into that special sauce to uplift those you know those communities builders like me at the national level really um aren't really doing much good at all so thank you so much you're doing god's work you really are the epitome of what president truman um said and and that is you know you can do a lot of good if you don't care who gets the credit thank you so much thank you thank you we we really appreciate that because one of the ways that you you fight back against the naysayers that are trying to destroy this nation in the name of social justice for blacks is to give a voice to those in whose name they say they are acting and you can undermine the moral authority of them when the people who they say they are they are protecting say they don't represent us and that's why the voices of grassroots leaders are speaking independently in in support of american values it is the foundation of this nation's virtues and values that enable this developed transformation to occur america is a nation of redemption any other questions yes sir yes thank you everyone um my question is for mr ponder um in california where i'm from originally uh you know we're we're coming to 20 plus years since uh three strikes uh three strikes and i'm aware i have a family member who uh just this past year uh just got back out so my question is do you have particular advice for individuals who are older so let's say in their 60s you know their people who are now in their 60s were coming out of three strikes any particular um advice for them uh that may be different from those who are more in terms of the prime of of their lives right and that's a that's a great question um you know re-entry is re-entry re-entry i believe that if you're 22 years old and getting out of the prison system if you're 60 years old right you're facing some of the same challenges the thing that we encourage uh folks at whatever age that is try to find the older folks try to find what that passion is right uh with something that you're passionate about doing and then seek out the training to help be able to move you uh in that uh in that proper direction and i think that um you know one of the things in in the area of employment right uh in our organization right now we're sitting on more jobs than we can we can fill right now because looking back starting out you know 10 years ago partnering with employers and you know getting them to hire formerly incarcerated people right the thing that we've learned that uh the majority of employers are not not willing to hire formerly incarcerated people they're not willing to hire a project so when we can train and equip at whatever age that help them to be a tremendous asset and not a liability uh to that business uh you know then that increases the probabilities of being uh you know full-time employee so seek out the training uh the number one thing um you know is seek out uh mentors that are in their life surround yourself with people that are getting the results that they want to get out of life okay start thank you bob incredible panel and as you know i work in welfare reform and all related issues and the passion is to remove the barriers over the non-profits angels that are doing this incredible work what would any of you say is a major barrier that we were not able to get in the last round of welfare reform even though there was a charitable choice initiative what is something that you would say if this weren't a policy i could do more i'm not so sure it's a policy barrier that we face what we do face is elitism as a principal barrier um we tend to support people who are very smart on both left and right and too many people on as michael novak said when people on the left look at the poor and blacks they see a sea of victims and people on the right see aliens that what we must do is i discourage some of my conservative scholars from continuing to do failure studies so far the only thing they do is what the woodson center has announced yesterday that we established the center for the study of resilience and we are collaborating with some major institutions because you can learn nothing from studying failure except how to create failure but no one left the right of center ever goes into these communities and studies how people succeeded some of those things historically you were talking about bronzeville durham north carolina all those we need to know how people succeeded against the odds in the past and how they're doing it today but there's no scholars need to study resilience and perseverance in a face of oppression and so we hope that that will uh uh continue next question i'm sorry let me let me just because you're the first part of your answer was about resources and when we put into law opportunity zone initiatives it allowed for the resources to now flow into the 8 700 broken zip codes that's on the business side to develop structure for jobs they're i'm wondering if they're anything that are hindering non-profits because they they're in every community as you're demonstrating but they seem to not have the influence and the capacity to build so i'm just wondering if there's anything that can be done with the data that's given to the policy makers so that we can change policies to make their job easier i just don't believe that the major bearish is a policy one i mean there are enough private resources we spend a hundred million dollar 100 million dollars in in in in um campaigns and whatnot and so we're appealing to private uh contributions in the marketplace and that's what i'm hoping yes yet another question of yes sir there you go hi i'm kenny shu president of colorist united what you said mr woodson was very interesting to me which was resilience and um we spend so much time talking about black failure and i just remember the moynihan report right and the study of the black family and how daniel patrick moynihan tried to if if people actually read that report that was almost the origin of the whole notion of systemic racism because he blames the decline of the black family that leads to these various cultural problems on this morass of systemic racism that justifiably occurred in the united states before then but it's just this report of failure and failure and failure and what what startles me about that is that [Music] if we actually take a look at the story of black americans in this country it is a story of incredible resilience an incredible success the fact that in spite of all of this discrimination and jim crow that black americans could establish these two-parent family structures and rise up in income and even and even create prosperity for themselves in the country now and and become some of the nation's leading entrepreneurs in media television business sports technology is inspiring that's a story of resilience and i feel that mac on a macro scale we focus so much way too much on failure thank you and i wonder and i wonder to you guys what do you think in the last 50 years in the last 50 years is the biggest macro story of black success in our country what we tried to do in our 1776 unites publication that was a response to the 1619 we went back and look at the history of what we did in in in in the first half of the 20th century that we we in our essays we talk about that when blacks are freed from slavery only five percent were literate in less than 40 years that went up to 70 percent and we were denied access to hotels we established our own the wala in atlanta the carver calvert hotel in my overtown in miami we have a phenomenal um i was born during the depression in 1937 but for all in a low-income black neighborhood i never heard of an elderly person getting mugged everyone had a man and a woman raising children in every household and so what we what we need to do is the great untold story in america is how black america in the in the first hundred years after slavery prospered in the face we had 20 blacks so born slaves who died millionaires these are stories that all children and all people need to know only in this great country could could a per a group make the kind of progress that we've documented in our 1776. so uh we're just delighted i guess we've come to the end of the program i want you to join me in thanking my palace

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 2,060

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, old parkland, old parkland conference

Id: uMKAz9sxRO8

Length: 63min 39sec (3819 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022