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Our school system is struggling
and one of the long-term consequences of that is that we are not tapping into
students that have the ability to be contributors to our community.
I am the executive director of the Baton Rouge Youth Coalition which is known
most commonly as BRIC.
We want to be able to train students to become leaders and also to have some
pride in
their communities and to kind of take some responsibility for changing
the things that need to be changed. We're pretty aggressive when
grand opportunities come around and I thought there are some pretty strong
alignment between
our vision and what State Farm was trying to do. Before this grant
happened we didn't have a formal program that connected students to internships
but with this opportunity we realize this happens so frequently let's make it
a bit more formal.
The idea is that by investing in our young people
and the talents that they have that they'll come back in be the people who
are investing in the next generation and so on and so forth that could become a
systemic change.
The neighborhood arts project
was designed basically as a mobile art
program. We bring all the art supplies, kids of
all ages. It involves massive amounts of help.
I had known Lucas for a while and I've been working with his students
so it seemed like a perfect fit because what I needed was
students that would have the opportunity
to learn how to not only be teachers, to learn
to work with kids and also to give back to their communities.
State Farm helped fund the position for these
students to assist with the program. It would not have been possible without
that help.
Just working with the community I never realized the potential that was really
out there
so once they exposed that to me I just can't let it go.
Before I joined BRIC, I was like how am I gonna get to where I wanna go in life?
It allowed me to expand my horizons more and
discover that we all have a purpose in life to do something great.
These are students who are not just going to be just participants in society
but they're gonna be innovators. They're gonna be activists. They're going to be
people who make
good change. And so if we create more
of those then we'll have more good change.