Thread: New York unveils $127 mn bid to help minorities

Only helping based on the race of the recipients? Sounds racist to me.


New York unveils $127 mn bid to help minorities

Aug 4 06:33 PM US/Eastern


New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, pictured in July 2011, Thursday unveiled ...

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg Thursday unveiled a $127.5 million campaign to help black and Hispanic youths who suffer from staggeringly high unemployment, crime and poverty rates.

The Young Men's Initiative aims to bring in policy reforms to "connect young men to educational, employment and mentoring opportunities across more than a dozen agencies," a statement from New York's City Hall said.

The three-year program will be funded jointly by private and public dollars.

Billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundation pledged $30 million, while the Bloomberg Philanthropies also donated $30 million with the remaining $67.5 million to come from city funds.

"When we look at poverty rates, graduation rates, crime rates, and employment rates, one thing stands out: blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom," Bloomberg said.

"Far too many are trapped in circumstances that are difficult to escape," he said. "Even though skin color in America no longer determines a child?s fate, sadly, it tells us more about a child's future than it should."

According to a recent report commissioned by the city, the poverty rate among young blacks and Latino men ages 18-14 in New York City's five boroughs is 50 percent higher than among their white and Asian peers.

Unemployment rates among the group were 60 percent higher and more than 90 percent of young murder victims and perpetrators are black and Latino, it said.

The report recommended the city work to reduce the achievement gap in schools by setting specific targets for black and Hispanic youth and reform the juvenile and criminal justice system to give them a second chance in society.

Specific initiatives within the program include $24 million that will be invested over three years to focus on college and career readiness among minorities.

There will also be initiatives to restructure in-jail services for inmates to prepare them for release, and more than $9 million will on expanding an internship program to help training for in-demand positions such as paramedics.

"This is a crisis that demands a crisis response," said New York Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs. "Expressly naming the problem of disparities and aggressively fighting barriers is how we are going to begin to achieve change.

"New York City is going to send a signal that the situation facing young black and Latino men requires the same kind of aggressive, cross-agency response that a natural disaster would demand, because fixing these outcomes is critical to the City's health and future."

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

A George Soros-bankrolled project. What could go wrong?

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