SAN DIEGO—"I realized that this is not just a black and white problem that we're dealing with. It has nothing to do with race at all. It's just about how people think," said Yahya Shabazz, CEO of Bridges, during a phone interview on Friday, Mar. 21. "Unless you change the way a person thinks, unless you change a person from the inside, it'll be hard to make any meaningful changes."
Helping San Diego's youth to not get pulled into gangs and drugs, Bridges takes a somewhat different approach than the conventional youth intervention program.
"This approach is pre-intervention. It is preventative measures before they need intervention. Before they need drug counseling, and before they need all of this other stuff," said Shabazz. "I don't think we should wait until they become criminals and drug addicts. We should take preventative measures first. If we start by building good values, standards, and character, we won't need to ever get to that point."
Developing Four Key Values
Although still in its beginning stages, Bridges is a non-profit organization that seeks to help kids develop a moral foundation by placing emphasis on four key elements: 'Consciousness', so as to help kids develop a value system based on community and family ethics; 'Character,' for encouraging self-improvement; 'Commitment,' to endure the hardships kids might face while trying to improve themselves; and, 'Entrepreneurship,' to teach kids to work and live in society. The program aims to help kids, not just through surface changes, but through helping them understand the importance of good values.
"You have to deal with the real problem that is family disintegration and the dissolution of the positive social structures around us," said Shabazz. "All of the traditional structures that hold up society and community, they're crumbling. So we have to start building up again those kinds of ideas and values within our youth."
Shabazz expressed his belief that it's hard for kids growing up in modern culture to not be negatively influenced. Mentioning things such as the glorification of gang culture by some musicians, negative role models, and sexually explicit content on TV have been changing the way kids act and think. "When you're having these kinds of influences coming into your community and into your home 24-7, it's hard to fight against it," said Shabazz.
"The environmental influence is primary. We've kind of lost touch. Our aspirations are so superficial. Our role models are people who are absent of these standards that we are trying to achieve, and our value system has all but been destroyed," said Shabazz. "So as a result of that, we've come to the situation we're in now. Kids have lost a lot of respect for authority and these kinds of things."
Program Components of 'Bridges'
At the first stage of the program, kids are helped to canvass the community, offering work on tasks such as mowing lawns, cleaning, and doing other household jobs in exchange for minimum wage compensation. The kids are then helped to start and manage their own bank accounts. Other parts of the program include getting parents involved in their children's lives, offering counseling, but most of the group activities will be based on the ideas of the kids themselves.
"Most of it will come from their inquisitiveness and the things that they want to do. These kids have very active minds that just need to be stimulated, and once you stimulate that, there's a lot of positive things that will come out of them," said Shabazz.
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