Charleston Promise Neighborhood

In a recently issued report called “Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate”, the NAACP tracks the steady shift of funds away from education and toward the criminal justice system.  Here a just a few items of interest from the report:

• Over the last two decades, as the criminal justice system came to assume a larger proportion of state discretionary dollars nationwide, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education.
• The majority of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails are people of color, people with mental health issues and drug addiction, people with low levels of educational attainment, and people with a history of unemployment or underemployment.
• In several of the communities studied (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston), there was a spatial relationship between “high-incarceration communities” and “low-performing schools”. Continue reading →

On May 12, 2011, the one year anniversary of the Charleston Promise Neighborhood incorporation, we held a reception on the Market Pavilion Hotel rooftop.  The purpose of the event was to engage with our current donors, partners and volunteers, but also to introduce the organization to potential new friends and supporters CPN.  The event was a tremendous success! Continue reading →

For me, the word “plan” often conjures up the image of a binder filled with a lengthy written report that includes detailed charts, data, and appendices. Perhaps it was mandated by some funding source. Or, maybe a previous Board of Directors thought it would be a good idea. Even worse, it may have been some MBA student’s class project.
Regardless of why it was commissioned, my experience is that plans like these are usually out-of-date by the time that they are written, provide very little practical guidance, and often provide high-level goals and objectives, but not the roadmap to get there. These plans are usually gathering dust on someone’s bookshelf and maybe dusted off once in a blue moon, which is usually because the next planning cycle is coming around. Continue reading →