hello everyone my name is roger colton and i'd like to welcome you today to community conversations through the community conversations podcast we hope to bring varying parts of the belmont community to the public we hope to make the process of learning about belmont not only educational but fun as well for today's show i have invited belmont resident dorothy stoneman to join us dorothy is the founder and soon to be retired chief executive officer of youth build usa an international organization providing education occupational training and leadership training to at risk young adults dorothy welcome to community conversations and thank you for being willing to join me on today sir thank you pleasure to be here and i've been looking forward to it dorothy when i think of youth build usa i think of an organization that works with at risk youth to provide them with a pathway to successful future but that notion of a pathway toward or toward a successful future is sort of a squishy image in the minds of many listeners can you simply introduce me  supports and promotes in the youth build program young people who have left high school without a diploma who are sixteen to twenty four who are all living in low income communities and have been raised in poverty find a path to their future somehow you know they're on the street they're out of work out of school they don't know what to do with their life and somebody tells them hey you can go to youth build so they come in and they discover that they can spend a year half their time in a very supportive academic classroom working toward the high school diploma or the high school equivalency which they never got and the other half of their time and we usually alternate a week in class in a week in this other half which is on a construction site building affordable housing for homeless and low income people in the neighborhoods so they get the experience of producing something of an enormous value to the neighborhood in a visible way where everybody can see that they are on the street now building something important and the two parts of these this program is tied together with a big emphasis on personal counseling peer group support leadership development and the internaliz ethic of service and there is a youth bill there is a domestic program i use the usa program but you also have global operations what does what does that mean they have a worldwide reach well let me say st that we started with one program in east harlem in one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight which i developed with some teenagers in east harlem when i lived in harlem and that work so well that we spread it in new york and then it worked so well in new york we spread it nationally and then countries from around the world are coming to us saying we need what you know can you please help us do this so we have responded to that interest in that need because there's about two hundred and fifty million young people around the world who are out of school and out of work and who are poor by helping those other countries and oftentimes through partnerships with national or international nonprofit organizations replicate the youth build program in their countries so we don't run those programs they're run locally we also don't run the programs in the united states that's two hundred and fifty dollars in the united states in fo they're run by local nonprofits in the u s and they're run usually by international n g o s with a base in the other countries sometimes they're run by public entities and what can you put some numbers on the need here in the united states there number i seem to remember is two million three hundred thousand low income sixty to twenty four year olds who are out of work and out of school that is the number we have used and i think it's now three million and then sometimes you hear the number five million four hundred thousand young people who are out of school and out of work who are currently in the united states being called opportunity youth because they're seeking opportunity and they offer an opportunity to society if we would invest in them so it's because and the young people prefer to be called opportunity youth than at risk youth or disconnected  disadvantaged youth or bad youth or you know thought drug dealers or whatever people call them on the spectrum of not being sympathetic to them but they like being opportunity youth and they are in fact an opportunity now when you hear the five million four hundred thousand number that's including young people who are not poor and who have may have finished high school who may have just dropped out of college so the three million figure is really the low income young people who how do you connect with the or how do those kids regular column kids are young adults people young people young people young adults young adults ok how do those young adults get from where they are so that they are they have a relationship with youth but more than half of them according to recent research more than half are told by a friend or relative you should go to youth build because their friends will tell them i worked for me you should do it you go there you get paid for the work you do the teachers really care about you you know you feel safe because the other students are all there for the same reason and you should go to  and the other half hear about it through a flyer on the street or you know another public another agency which might suggest that they go there maybe sometimes they're referred by a judge or a probation officer so you're you're a resident of belmont yes i know and have been here for as long as i can remember i've known you for a number of years but here you're a resident of this little community of twenty i say st i was actually born and raised in belmont so i was born here in one thousand nine hundred and two and left in one thousand nine hundred and fifty nine when i graduated from belmont public high school now then i was gone for thirty years and i lived in new york i lived in harlem and i came back to belmont when my mother had alzheimer's disease and so my family came back to take care of her and she had lived in belmont all that time had been president of the league of women voters and had been deeply rooted in belmont so belmont is definitely my home town and what i'm interested in is well let me tell you my bias up front and then have you respond from your personal perspective and my bias is that individual people boston and you've helped build an organization that reaches nationwide forty six states can you talk a little bit about your personal journey and helping to found you trying to end poverty is interesting because i grew up in a totally protected bubble in belmont you know it was wonderful safe community but when i was fourteen my family took the classical trip to europe right and we went to france and i went to italy and in those countries i witnessed poverty i saw people in the streets i saw homeless people i saw hungry people i such and it totally shocked me and i said i have to do something about that and i would never want to look away from that how come i haven't been aware of it and so then i came back and became this pain in the butt to all my friends in high school  would say to them we have no idea how lucky we are we're growing up in belmont we have twenty years of complete freedom and good fortune and we have an obligation to learn as much as we can and prepare ourselves to go out and help the world so that was the turning point and i really felt belmont was you know back then we barely had television you know we were not aware of what was going on in the rest of the world everything looked good then of course there was the civil rights movement and i graduated from harvard in  three and in those early sixty's i woke up to the issues of inequality and racism in this country which is different from generic poverty and then i moved to harlem in one thousand nine hundred and sixty four now th your question was about how did i start this yes yes it was the one difficult thing i think people have a hard time getting their hands around is the move from an idea to a proposal to a program to a successful right program it seems like there's a continuum there and you've pushed that through through that yeah and you know it's my father was very entrepreneurial he would just make things happen you know we had three hundred pigeons in our backyard in a building you know right so it's kind of raised with some sense that there were no limits and i also was raised in belmont with complete freedom you know i got  my little bicycle after school and rode it when broke from belmont hill and so i had a certain sense of personal freedom and efficacy so when i began this it wasn't i didn't have a big plan i just had a kind of vision and instinct and so i just put one foot in front of another and i asked people in the starland i asked the young people what would you change about the community if i could get you the money if i could get you adult support and they said well we'd rebuild all of these abandoned buildings and we'd create housing for the homeless and we would create homes for mothers who can't afford to live anywhere because they don't have a job and we create a leadership school and we create gardens and so they had all sorts of good ideas if you ask people what they would do if they had the power they have good ideas and so since i had this sense of efficacy which came from belmont and harvard i just began to try to do it st as a volunteer again i was free to do it as a volunteer because i wasn't poor and i pulled people together and then i wrote a proposal and i got the money and then we're off and running and it's been like that ever since of one dollar foot in front of another i'd like to remind listeners that where we are talking to dorothy stoneman today dorothy is the founder and soon to be retired executive director or c e o of youth build u and we're talking not not only about dorothy's journey through the creation of this organization but we want to talk a little bit more about the organization itself to when we've got three the moment when we got federal funds and how do you measure your accomplishments with these fifteen thousand young folks is it the number of people placement in college placement in jobs and wages recidivism rates and retention in jobs and college we also of course track the number of housing units and when i started it i i had no idea what we would be able to do as far as powering the young people to change their lives through one experience so my attitude was hey building affordable housing is a significant enough outcome in itself if that's all we did that would be enough  but as a matter of fact we do we've built about thirty two thousand units of affordable housing in the united states but more than half of the young people who enroll in the program landed safely in college  jobs averaging about ten dollars an hour and more than half of the and that means of the enrollees so it's about sixty percent who who land there i'd like to back up for a minute we've been talking about a ford ab schools and community buildings am i right in that yes to some degree but let much less and there's a there's an interesting reason for that when we went to the government with the help of john kerry to create a bill that would fund the youth build under with federal funds they some of the staff on capitol hill said well you shouldn't limit this to affordable housing you should just do any kind of construction and i went back to the young people who we always have in leadership i always ask the young people for for their input on key decisions and they said no way we want to build affordable housing for poor people we don't want to go build you know business billings in offices we want to build housing for for poor people and then so the law ended up saying affordable housing with a fifteen percent that could be for public facilities you mentioned being tied into the federal government through senator kerry my understanding is that you build us a really does have a relationship a formal relationship with the u s department of labor right and he talks about that a little it's a fascinating and important thing to understand we started as an independent nonprofit organization and yes i had a vision of a movement that would liberate the positive energy of young people across the country to rebuild their communities and their lives and so we spread it deliberately but there was a moment but i also felt that there was a public responsibility to end poverty so once we had proven that this worked in twenty cities across the country i went to congress to find sponsors who would help create a bill that would authorize it in public law so we could get this program funded as a federal program comparable in law to job corps to peace corps to america or to head start and john kerry was the one who took that bill and so i wrote it in collaboration with his staff and it was passed and it was funded and it's been that was passed in one thousand nine hundred and two it's been funded every year since so that money that the th the congress has to appropriate every single year goes directly to the department of labor does not come to youth build usa the department of labor distributes it around the country through a competitive process to local nonprofit organizations who say we would like to bring youth build to our community and they have to make the case for it they get chosen by the department of labor we do not choose their grantees now we wrote into the law that five percent of the federal appropriation would be used for training and technical assistance for those grantees and it's a national nonprofit organization would also be selected in a competitive process to provide that so use the usa competes for that contract every five years and then if we are selected and we typically have been selected since one thousand nine hundred and two then department of labor pays us to go out and provide the information the training the knowledge the support the coaching and everything else that the needs of the programs to have philosophical integrity to get that the picture clear in my mind and and it may be different then what i had coming in right so you think there is youth b usa right and then there are two hundred and sixty programs but i had been thinking that there were two hundred and sixty youth build programs but there you have two hundred and sixty partners you don't have two hundred and sixty you build and so but we gave it to the government so there's two ways a local organization can get to call themselves youth build they can even win that competition for federal funds or we can license them to use the name most of them do both so about sixty five percent of youth build programs are licensed by us and funded by the government i understand ok it's complicated it turns out it is complicated turns out to work extremely well because in an on another level because the government has us both as a driver because we do the advocacy every year to try and get that money into the into the budget but also as a partner and an innovator we go out we get private money we get the corporations and the foundations to give us money to create innovative cutting edge enhanced mintz of the program so then we add additional career paths so we've added health care we've added technology or we build partnerships with companies so we've built a big partnership with starbucks and we've worked with them to have a customer service curriculum which is focused on our population so and then we bring that to the government and the government says well that worked well we'll add it to the federal delivery system and you're talking in a lot about employment training but you know old also has a national schools initiative to my correct in that you know like i i don't remember the exact number but ninety three percent ninety seven percent of the king of the young folks  diploma built into the program for all programs is fifty percent of the program time is classroom education personalise small groups individual attention from teachers to get their high school equivalency or their diploma and so that half of the time in some cases we've transformed those schools through our national schools initiative which is funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation into alternative public schools or charter schools so there are about forty of our two hundred and fifty programs which give a high school diploma because they've been authorized to do that by the by the county or by the state so that's the national school's initiative it's really just the difference between well it's funding because they get average daily attendance funding and so that's more stable than the federal youth build program it allows them to get bigger so we have some youth build charter schools which have two hundred dollars students whereas most of the programs have thirty to fifty students with the federal department of labor funds and those schools work for the same students who left high school and they left if you ask them why did you leave high school why did you they have a few reasons one i i had to make some money to support my family two nobody in there nobody cared about me there they did teachers didn't care about me then care for i was there not three i don't feel safe there there was problems in with the other students in the school and i just didn't want to be there one of those reasons or some combination and then do the young people go on to two year four year schools or community colleges as i do they have a post secondary education yes some do but it's what our goal is at the end of youth build you get your high school equivalency or your diploma and you have construction skills and you've got a whole bunch of industry certified you know industry certifications and you've built a building so you can choose you are ready to go to college or the military to do whatever you want in the future are you ready to go into a pretty good paying construction job so or any other job that you want and we now we have a retail training too because that's where a lot of the jobs are the  about twenty percent go into post secondary education about and in different periods of time up to thirty three percent going to construction as low as ten percent during the period of the recession go into construction that should increase in the current period because there's a shortage in the construction industry of prepared workers and then quite if you go to the nonprofit sector they really actually come out of youth build most i think most of them are inspired by their service they're inspired by having built affordable housing and having given this house to a homeless person and having been seen as heroes instead of hoodlums in their community with their tool belt and their hard hats people say thank you to them instead of once you get off the streets it's so they a lot of them want to go into leadership in nonprofit world into public service let's talk about leadership from it because that's a big part of i have used t doesn't reach all fifteen thousand young people can you talk about that the national council of young leaders who what is it well i should probably answer the question a little differently because i get to the national big but you're right that's a small percentage we require every program to have a local policy council of young people who meet weekly with their director and who have input into hiring into budget into policies governing the program and into advocating for the program with elected officials and even helping fundraising so young people at the local level have a chance to see themselves as somebody whose ideas are taken seriously who intelligence is respected who have have a voice in the conversations affecting their program that's a radical change from anything they've experienced in the past and when they experience that they want to build that out they want to become people who are heard in wider circles yeah and it ition to expecting that at the local level then we also have national conferences we've had a conference of young leaders in washington d c for every year for twenty seven years and at that conference the young people get to go to capitol hill and they get to talk to their elected officials and they're totally blown away by the fact that they are on capitol hill talking to these people who they thought were way beyond their r and some people at that conference get elected to the youth build young leaders council where they can serve for three years then we have a lot of i conferences where young people elect representatives for the national  council and so we it's very hard to get money for leadership development so we have to eke it out from individual donations that we get from unrestricted funds to sustain these councils and these conferences they're extremely important we've had some research done by tufts by the circle group at tufts about youth build pathway into leadership there are very few pathways into leadership for low income young people nobody thinks of them as potential leaders they're lucky if they don't end up in jail or dead they will say to you i thought i was sure i would be dead or in jail i get one thousand i'll say thousands it's probably hundreds in reality who have come to me and said thank you so much for starting your spill because without it i would probably be dead or in jail and the that in itself is a sin in a shame and so getting people into college and jobs rather than dead or in jail is step one but how do people get from being stuck in poverty to being a leader who transforms the community and eliminates poverty that's a different path so we try to create that now you mentioned the national council of young leaders it's a slightly different thing which we have created in collaboration with fifteen other national organizations that's a national council of young people in their twenty's who have been through a program and it might be youth build or it might be up city year the service and conservation corps or other programs public allies and they come together and they have created their recommendations for increasing opportunity in decreasing poverty in america now they're trying to create their movement to present solutions to the government for doing exactly that called opportunity youth united and their goal is to bring together black white latino native american asian male female all genders too and poverty together see because they see a need for unity across races and across urban  rural communities toward ending poverty and they want to not just escape from poverty they want to not just create a pathway out of poverty for themselves and their peers they want to change the conditions of poverty into which they and their families were born roughly what's next on the life agenda for dorothy stone this seems like something you don't just walk away from it is a passion not a right not an occupation what's next on your life  your life journey will see i mean i know a few things i know i will continue to work with the opportunity youth united movement which is you know goes has always been part of the vision i will not serve on the board or be in management or you know i'm this is a wonderful new c e o coming in to run you build and i'm happy not to be in charge of it anymore i'll spend more time with my husband my family i'll spend more time hiking biking swimming and all of that my rights and stuff and i mostly want to just open up to see what happens to see where i where my passion takes me in the next period well i offer you m belmont media center if someone wanted to learn more about youth build usa or if they wish to support youth build usa where would they go what would they do well the st thing would be to go to our website which is youth build dot org and you know read more learn more they can donate donations are of critical importance i mean we even though we have gotten public funds for local programs we depend on individual donations to do all the creative work and all the advocacy and all of leadership development and so and we actually multiply every dollar by two hundred dollars times through our advocacy which is kind of you know a great leveraging and then if they want to get involved it's a little harder if they want to get involved personally we do have a little friends of youth build group which includes belmont residents and some people you may know nancy shef brayan we need every two weeks in somerville and if to think about fundraising people can have house parties a nanny ahlquist and others have had house parties where we bring young people who speak and inspired the audience to get to give and get involved and people can be a mentor to youth build students and graduates if they want to get involved in that way thank you very much dorothy it's been great fun today we've had  laughs and i really appreciate you taking the time to come over to waverly square here and be with us on community conversations we've been talking today with belmont resident doroth stoneman dorothy is soon to be retired as the c e o of youth build usa and i would like to think dorothy again for joining us today and i would like to thank you the listeners for tuning in you can listen to this  it online at w w w dot belmont media dot org or by accessing it on line two at w w w dot wicked local belmont dot com you can also download this from i tunes by searching for the b m c podcast network i would encourage our listeners both to stay tuned to the media center and to read the weekly belmont citizen herald for continuing information about events going on throughout the town about much i'm your host roger colton thank you again for listening and i will talk to you again in two weeks