Help youth find inner peace
In 2009, I drove to the Gwinnett County Detention Center to visit a kid I had connected with years earlier when he was a teenager. Now, he was a grown young man. After years inside one of the toughest street gangs in the world, he was facing potentially the most severe punishment, which he avoided, only to look at a life sentence inside a maximum security prison.
I worked with him weekly for two years and saw him transform before my eyes. He happened to be Latino, and we reconnected and got very close because he already trusted this middle-aged white man from East Cobb. He trusted me because we had made that bond that we were now building on from years before.
That set into motion a new course and trajectory for my work that has only gained momentum the past five years. This work has taken me inside prisons all over the United States, as well as in South Africa, Mexico, Ukraine and Honduras. This fall, I plan to go to Kuwait.
Eventually my work began to take me into schools. Prevention became my cause. I was meeting these young people’s fathers, big brothers, uncles and grandfathers on the “inside,” and I wanted to see if we could break the cycle and reverse the generational curse.
I began to work in city schools with black and Hispanic kids in tough areas of town. However, I began to come to terms with an uncomfortable realization: This was not a black or white problem. It wasn’t a rich or poor problem. It wasn’t about inner cities versus the suburbs, or the ‘hoods rather than the gated communities.
No, this was — and is — a generational, human problem, and kids are in the crosshairs. We are losing a generation of kids — black, white, brown, rich, poor, inside the Perimeter and outside. This is a generation that is quickly losing its way and needs to be redirected.
We recently lost two kids to street violence in an inner-city school where we do our “Inspired Straight” program through the Power of Peace Project. In that same period, we lost four kids from a North Fulton school to suicide.
Kids today are being bombarded with more information, faster, with practically unlimited access. They are being tempted with things that our generation did not face, or faced at a much older age. It’s not just alcohol, weed and fooling around with girls any more. The “new normal” is sex texting, painkillers and violent video games.
Recently, when I was speaking in South Africa, Dr. Bernard Lafayette — Dr. Martin Luther King’s right hand man — reminded me of King’s final wish. He said that we needed to institutionalize a non-violence message and take it into the schools to a younger generation. That’s what my organization intends to do: Help this young generation find peace on the inside, so they have no need for the foolishness they use. Please help: http://thepowerofpeace.org.
Kit Cummings is founder and president of The Power of Peace Project Inc., a nonprofit that works to reduce crime, rehabilitate inmates and lower school dropout rates.
