Burgess Owens: “everybody says that they want to do things for young people. They recognize they are a special problem. But when you…”

“everybody says that they want to do things for young people. They recognize they are a special problem. But when you have a perfect program like YouthBuild, we have a great deal of difficulty getting it continued and expanded. YouthBuild is the perfect program in terms of maximum participation and use of resources by the people who are being helped and minimum bureaucracy, minimum overhead. I have a YouthBuild program in my district, and it functions in the poorest community in my district, in one of the poorest communities in the United States. Brownsville is a community that has many indices that run parallel in a negative way. No matter how you look at it, the number of young people who are in juvenile delinquency programs, the number of AIDS cases, the low level of education, the low reading levels, that community has every strike against it, and young people have a rough time. But the YouthBuild program has a director who came aboard several years ago and said, ``If you want to be in this program, no alcohol, no drugs. You have got to be here on time, and you have got to be here frequently. One or two absences, and you are out.'' Yet the program has a long waiting list. Young people see the program as having a concrete and immediate consequence. They see themselves being able to get a job. They also are required to get a high school diploma at the same time.”