This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Communities and neighborhoods need to begin taking responsibility for helping disadvantaged youth — especially minorities — get the education they need and overcome the obstacles they face in this country, a White House official told a group of students and educators Saturday.
"We have this moral obligation to make sure our neighbors kids are our kids," said Michael Smith, a special assistant to President Barack Obama who is leading the My Brothers Keeper initiative spearheaded by the White House.
"My Brothers Keeper and the work we're doing here today is figuring out how to … make sure in every community there are safety nets, there are springboards, there are people looking out for you and we're all responsible for each other," Smith said.
Smith was a featured speaker at the Salt Lake City GradNation Summit on Saturday at the Glendale Community Center, where students, teachers and parents focused on the importance of finishing high school and discussed strategies for ways to foster the goal.
Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker praised the Obama administration for its My Brothers Keeper Initiative.
"The focus I've seen time and again is [President Obama] sees the federal government's job as finding ways to support communities," Becker said. "You see it with My Brothers Keeper, you see him doing things we all can learn from."
The initiative grew out of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, the black Florida teen who was shot and killed walking through his neighborhood.
"[The president] said our kids need to know they matter. They're getting way too much negative reinforcement. … There has to be something we can do about what boys and young men of color, especially, are facing in this country," Smith said. "It was this idea that America has to remember this place where we have a responsibility for our neighbor's children."
The program officially launched in February 2014, focused on closing the gaps in opportunity for young minority men.
Minority students remain much less likely to graduate, Smith said. Minorities have a higher unemployment rate, make up 70 percent of the nation's prison population and black boys and young men make up half of the nation's murder victims.
He said that every cabinet-level agency that deals with domestic policy has been working to try to create programs to help overcome those obstacles.
"I think what's even more important than what we're doing is we're shining a spotlight on work that's happening across the country, realizing we don't have all the answers in Washington," Smith said.
Moana Uluave, who recently got her graduate degree in education from Harvard and works on an arts program at the Glendale center and does other volunteer work, said the statistics about those who fall through the cracks are not abstract to her.
"I work with students and people who have dropped out and people who are incarcerated, people who are not citizens, who are not voters and I see it every day," she said. "If My Brothers Keeper is taking care of those who are in our family, it's a literal thing for me. I am looking out for my brothers and my sisters."
Joanne Milner, an adviser to Becker and who is the Salt Lake City School District education partnership coordinator, said one of the biggest challenges she sees is convincing state legislators to pay attention to the needs of underserved communities.
"Our legislative body is indifferent to the population we have here in our community. They don't see this as one of the most vital resources we have," Milner said. "Our demographics are quite unique in our capital city. … [but] they're indifferent to our population."
Alama Uluave, Moana's father, was blunt in telling the policymakers they can't understand the real challenges and needs of people in low-income communities until they actually go meet them and know them.
"You read all these statistics and so forth, but they're nonsense. You'd better come down to the village and learn first-hand what it's like to live in poverty," Uluave said.
He said more money and new programs aren't what the communities need. The solutions, he said, will come from the grassroots by empowering the people and need to be holistic, addressing not just education but health care and other issues of those in poverty.
And the people need to overcome a sense of apathy and "fatalism" that has overcome many.
"We've been at it for so long [some think], 'They're going to kill us off anyway, so we'll just die poor. We'll die stupid. We'll die uneducated,'" Uluave said, "because there is no hope."
Twitter: @RobertGehrke