Armando Vazquez
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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
We at Keys Leadership Academy @ Cafe on A currently have a job placement services contract with the County of Ventura’s Probation Department. It is the toughest professional work that I have ever done in 50 years of community service; the business community has never wanted to take on a troubled kid; he will of course be a troubled employee. The government deals with these at risk kids mostly by punishment with the insane notion that that will create responsibility, we the parents and friends and community of these at-risk kids just hang on, pray a lot and wait until the years beat submission and intuitional and civic compliance into those youth that don’t end up in jail, lifelong justice supervision, or the cruel final remedy death.
So when I watched last Sunday’s 60 Minutes’ enthralling segment, Year Up, a story about a successful Wall high level executive, Gerald Chertavain, and a black ghetto kid that Chevrotain takes under his wing and teaches him the fine unscientific science of finance and banking Wall Street style, revealed and confirmed again, a universal truth, to the millions of the television viewers that were watching the segment; namely that if you give a kid ( a human) a real break; that kid will grab that opportunity like a drowning kid would take to a celestial lifeboat.
Once in the lifeboat the kid still needs to learn how to swim, that where Chertavain is a spiritual and practical genius, he designed, developed, and promoted to his corporate business community, a one year highly demanding job preparation program that provides under privileged youth the technical and financial corporate work skills to go along with the requisite mind set skills to be able to, “swim with the Wall Street and Fortune 500 sharks”, and today these young men and women are thriving in this very challenging and demanding business environment.
Chertavain began with a simple premise, if you level the technology work field by giving the under privileged youth of our communities world class and real life long term (one year or more) work/life preparation skills set these under privileged young adults can and will compete successfully in the corporate world with anyone, anywhere, at any level.
Our under privileged youth in Oxnard and Ventura county are not broken or damaged beyond repair, they are no different that the youth in the Year Up Program; they just need that real honest, long term practical and brilliant designed life/work skills instruction program (transformational life opportunity) that Chertavain has proven for the past 8 years in his work with his Year Up Program that irrefutably demonstrates that even the most at risk and under privileged youth can thrive in the most demanding work environment if the community provides the long term work/life skills every kid deserves.
The second brilliant aspect of the Year Up program is that it instructs and training the at risk youth students/interns in geographically specific labor market work skills, in his New York city model, the work/life instruction is in banking/financing and hi-tech computer skills. Chertavain has combined Wall Street with Silicon Valley to create an ingenious instructional model that has produced over the years a rich pool of highly trained entry level banking, financing and hi-tech computer professionals in a geographical market that can and has provided work opportunities for the vast number of successful Year Up graduates with great jobs.
My mind reeled with excitement, Year Up, can be a great template for Oxnard and Ventura County. Here is how acting locally we can take on the daunting challenges of creating and providing long term high-tech computer and environmental reclamation and management instruction and training opportunities to our at risk and under privileged youth that lead to great jobs and at the same time tackling one of the major ecological disasters of the nation.
In Oxnard we have a major ecological disaster at Ormond Beach. The devastation, degradation and contamination to this unique beach/wetland area s are so great that it is designated as a super fund ecological restoration site by the federal government.
For one moment ignore the politics and litigation that stymies any recent create ideas and work to restore the Ormond Beach area to its pre-Halaco era pristine ecological balance and beauty and let us think about taking on the job of cleaning up Ormond Beach ourselves with our youth leading the way.
The major players are there, the city of Oxnard, the County of Ventura, the local schools and colleges, the federal and state government with funding and technical assistance and support. All that is missing is a major private business concern that has both the technical expertise to take on an ecological restoration project of this magnitude, maybe the private business can be a local waste management company, a combination of government, capital venture speculators and a reputable waste/reclamation company, this a very long term project that may take decades, but it can be done and the Oxnard and entire Ventura County youth work force is just waiting for the opportunity to be trained at a world class competitive level and contribute immensely to the restoration and transformation of one of the most polluted super fund sites to one of the most beautiful area of beach in all of the world.
Year Up proves irrevocably that if you provide superior world class long term (investment) instruction provided to our at risk youth, these youth can and will rise to any challenge and compete and contribute to the local, national global work force. We have nothing to lose but the fear of failure; our kids deserve our courage, commitment and above all long term world class relevant scientific, high-tech and financial instruction. Oxnard, Ventura County we can pull together and create an agrarian Year Up program and in one decade restore the Ormond Beach area to its previous pristine slender.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., and Deborah De Vries are co-executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.
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