Every Labor Day weekend, Community Coalition’s youth project, South Central Youth Empowered through Action (SCYEA), takes 30 youth on a Bay Area college tour where students visit major universities and meet with local community leaders and social justice activists. This year, eight of these students will document the road trip and the challenges they face getting into college through writing, photos and videos.
The purpose of the blog is to document the impact of this trip on the lives of the youth and to follow their stories throughout the year as they prepare college applications and confront challenges and hurdles on the road to college.
Why
Every year an estimated 1 out of 2 South LA students “disappear” or drop out of high school. An even more dismal number of youth end up at a four-year college. But for the past 20 years Community Coalition’s youth leadership development program, SCYEA, has been beating those odds. Ninety-five percent of SCYEA members graduate and attend four-year universities.
These youth must overcome tremendous hurdles and barriers to get to college, including attending some of Los Angeles’ worst performing and overcrowded schools, overcoming a public education system that fails to prepare them for college or good-paying careers, confronting violence in their communities on a daily basis, and sometimes having family and parents who are unable to support their college dreams.
SCYEA
SCYEA helps develop African-American and Latino youth to be the next generation of leaders to create positive change in our schools and our community of South L.A.
SCYEA is part of Community Coalition, a social justice organization based in South Los Angeles that works to transform the social and economic conditions in South LA that foster addiction, crime, violence and poverty by building a community institution that involves thousands in creating, influencing and changing public policy.
