We’ve launched our year-end annual campaign: “Fund Passion. Not Prison.”
At BAYCAT we believe in the power of education through arts and tech as the best way to inspire our youth to stay in school, find their creative passions, and be lifelong learners. For the past 11 years, BAYCAT has educated more than 3,250 low income kids, kids of color and young women. We need help from the community to keep our FREE educational arts and tech programs available to the youth who need them most.
The US has the highest incarceration rate of the developed world, and its prisons are overwhelmingly filled with African-Americans and Latinos. The paths to prison are many, but often the starting points are access to education and foster care systems. Here in SF, the land of a growing gap of “Haves” and “Have Nots;” it matters what zip code you were born in, or if you were even born in this country. Add to that generations of inequality, quality of our schools, and access to technology, the stakes are against most of our low income youth, youth of color and young women to finish school, let alone to find their passion and a dream job.
You need some data?
- 70% of students involved in “in-school arrests” or referred to law enforcement are African-Americans or Latinos.
- 40% of students expelled from U.S. schools each year are African-Americans.
- African-Americans and Latinos students are twice as likely to not graduate high school as Whites.
Below an Infographic with some staggering data.
Clik here to view.
Source: Community Coalition
As mentioned in a previous blog post, prison and the juvenile system is also the topic chosen by our BAYCAT Academy students for their upcoming show Zoom In #34, that will be premiered on December 8, at Z Space in San Francisco. Don’t miss it.
What do you think? We’ll cover more this topic in the coming months and would love your opinion.
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