The People's Money (2022-2023)

What problem would you like to solve?

The problem that our community especially poverty stricken communities is that it does not have an affordable/free community space for the youth to go to. Some parents cannot afford after school programs or extracurricular activities for their children. The lack of free or affordable resources causes our youth to have a low chance of exploring arts, dance, swim, or any other activities that children with more financial resources have. Youth in poverty stricken area tend to either stay at home, are on electronics for long periods of time or at some extremes become involved in street violence.

Our youth do not have a fair chance in society compared to children's with more financial status but to underexposure of activities. Some of our youth would be great swimmers but cannot afford swim class. Some youth would be great at tennis, basketball, soccer or other sports but cannot afford lessons. Some schools have money to offer dance, art or music classes. Some schools do not have the budget for it.

Why is it important to solve? Why is it relevant for the community?

It is important to solve this lack of community resource crisis so that working families have a safe, free or affordable community center for their children to go to. Our youth need creative outlets. Whether its through play, hands on skills, community clean ups, or recreational activities. Our communities deserve this. We see and uptick in violence in our teenage youth, because they get off of school at 2:30pm and they hang out outside. Their parents don't arrive home until 6pm if they work a 9-5pm. As a result, our youth from 2:30pm-6:00pm, if they are not in a extracurricular activity. How are they being stimulated?

What idea do you have to address the problem?

We can have free swim, dance, art, stem, music, poetry or writing workshops, fashion design classes hand on work shops and etc. We can have mental health therapist their to provide individual and group therapy. We can have the youth pick the activities they would like in their communities. This will allow them to have a say in what they would like so that they would want to go. Each community should have a community center in their neighborhood. The idea is to have a something that interest all of our youth at each age. It can be ran under community boards. This will allow the leaders of that community to be involved in the roll out of the community center. It can be secured by police officers and even school safety officers. It would be a city wide community center that is tailored by the community for the community. We can use this to empower our youth. We can have community clean ups, community revitalizations, community talent shows, community sports teams, community safety. This will give our youth a voice and a choice. That will be long lasting skills they an use in adulthood.

We can have community board take a census of how many youth in our communities and then that will direct how may sites each community should have.

There are a lot of luxury building being built in places that we can have community centers. We cannot allow this to continue to happen.

Who would that help?

This will increase community engagement with police because they will secure the area. This will be a place to mediate some of the community violence some our youth may have with each other. This will help out youth fully. Our youth are slipping before our eyes into a world of algorithm, tik tok, social media. Some of our youth want to be social media stars instead of trying to learn how to build a app or go to college. It is our responsibility as community leaders to prepare our youth to be leaders in this world. Not just leaders of a new dance trend, or social media trend. If we continue to have our youth in a social media world, while we are in a real world that deals with war, poverty, climate change, racism, injustice, and inequality, then we are setting our youth up for failure. This will help our mothers and fathers to know that their children are in a safe place. It takes a village to raise our youth and it time to make sure our youth are truly being guided to be leaders, changers of this world and empowered to be all they they an be. We need a community center so that our children can play with each other, they can learn how to come together and create things, they can learn how to get along with each other no matter the race, or social economic status. Our youth are very smart they have great ideas and they need a place they can go to to explore.

This will help our youth be exposed to extracurricular activities. This will allow our youth to form great relationships with police officers. Community politicians can meet the youth and be motivational speakers to them. We an have community members who are experts at certain things volunteer to teach our youth. This will increase engagement with children and also with adults an other mothers and fathers or community members.

What NYC borough would benefit from your idea?

All borough. We are located in Brooklyn NY