and we would like to invite you to join us at town hall style panel discussion along with different members of our community to discuss issues pertaining to the and longtime leaders in our community such as eunice i am looking forward to seeing all of you at the next m m r t i presents race and social justice that's multi media resources and training institute building communities through media and we get the opportunity to come together next thursday september third from four o'clock we will celebrate the p r i violence prevention initiative and their fabulous film called the joy of soccer that starts at four pm and refreshments will be served so please come and support your youth and then following that we will have the second  set in our race and social justice forum called access to fair housing so again that's next thursday september third at the twenty one hundred building basically the corner of hill and rainier and it will be from four pm and stay on through to seven thirty it's going to be packed full of greatness and we want your voices we want your questions so again please come to what i like about the sounders is i like having another professional team in seattle i like soccer i like that soccer kind of brings a bunch of cultural pieces and ethnic groups all together for the love of the game we had multicultural groups from really from the country of africa coming together to discuss kids i saw retrains in the group us all if you open a group us all some somalis in the group we had a man from kenya and one of the things that we were discussing and getting understanding of is that we need to support our kids better we can no longer just send our kids to school we need to take our kids to school other cultures take their kids and we need to make sure we're taking our kids versus in the school one of the main things that i've seen with our young people is that they're getting to know the people in school more than they're getting to know parents at home as in parents we feed them and clothe them but our parents have to support the efforts of our young people make sure they get into the right college the right state the right area make sure the taken the right classes in high school and not just allow school systems to sign our kids up i think this panel discussion is really going to galvanize all of our groups coming together and working together on a common goal which is to be which is to put our differences aside and bring all of our kids together on the same page to make sure that our kids get the best out of life possible and we as adults are going to make sure we do everything we can to be present in accountable and leading our kids to the next level interesting and i work for the seattle office for civil rights on the recent social justice initiative we're partnering with and the monetary i must part of the racial equity fund that our office manages which is funding projects in the community that specifically address structural and institutional racism ome we funded and i'm r t i and i'm really happy to be working with them because they represent an organization that's working with young people immigrant communities people of color to give voice to the issues that are important to them and that's something that's not necessarily historically been part of traditional media sources and so we really wanted to support that work because we see that homes are civically address is something that plays out in institutionalized racism in the media and we're really excited to be partnering on the panel that's coming up and it's an opportunity to really have the communities voice centered around issues of violence in the community and what we can do together to move forward to address that pattern of racism  and that's what he does a lot of things for the community and a lot of youth around the king county and you want to get a little bit into kind of what your organization is focused on for your yes so my organization  organization that run there is there to kill services someone specifically who were contracted through the city to provide services for c r u for this prevention initiative and our main goal is to engage young people in seeing a little further down the road them a capable seeing on their own some of the angles that we're really taking with young people seeing their lives through the lens of academics seeing their eyes seeing their lives through the lens of societal justice and seeing their lives through  lens of helping others beyond just helping themselves and in light of the fact that here but history month just recently what is your perspective on the current state of racial relations within either us or counties well in the u s i think the state of race relations is kind of a regional thing i think regionally a lot of individuals and groups have kind of held on to some of the things of the past and i'm not saying that a lot of those things need to be forgotten but progress needs to still happen as far as being people of color we've got to take advantage of the academic offerings and the a bility to get educated we have to be self motivated to finish high school at the tops of our class you know that talented tim that cream of the crop and then we need to matriculate on it to where this community college or a four year college or the trades but we as a people and people of color have to understand that academics and education is going to be the key to unlocking a lot of doors and even if the individual does not want to educate themselves they still need to make sure the doors open for their kids in their kids kids if they can be a mentor in the community nieces nephews they're eventually going to be grandparents some time down the road so we have to begin to see life is much bigger than the life we want to live far selves and do some of the things in life and life that it's going to take to progress neighborhoods and communities versus what i as an individual want to do and my sight or lack thereof as an individual so in king county b the state of washington there are a lot of resources for community brace and grassroots organizations so we have to create a vibrant pipeline and that pipeline is going to really understand the pipeline is really going to begin with an understanding that our young people again need to see life bigger than themselves academically there has to be a focus families have to reengage the schools the schools need to become the hubs of communities as far as academics go and there has to be some social setting and a form where the families the elders and the young people can get together and see life through a common lens we can't continue to live life on our own thinking things will be ok because they will not be ok so some of the things that we're pushing and i know you have a bunch of questions but i've been speaking a lot of our students that are struggling a lot of our african american boys are struggling and one of the things that i really need to get some understanding is english language learners that applies to every young person who grows up in a household and their family is not proficient and speaking good english so i think a lot of special ed classes and a lot of the things that are going on in school if we could just change the lens of how we view these things we don't have to change the entire system but we need to begin to find each school and to find small cohorts and roll some different courts of kids into some classes and begin to give them the necessary skills that it's going to take to progress so you know that issue of race relations it has to begin with us each individual group has to stand up and standing up is horrid and i'm not saying things haven't existed in the past that have caused people to sit down or lack legs to stand up but two thousand and fifteen we have to make some different decisions we have to begin to think differently or to do differently skill that is going to be able to allow you all the ability to move forward whether it's being a front of the camera and back of the camera setting up the camera these are all necessary job skills and we all as organizations need to be really intentional about putting these types of puzzles together and understand that each young person is a different piece of that is a different piece of the puzzle their individual piece and then the bigger picture would be allowing them to see the how they fit in to make the puzzle complete so i appreciate this program for several organizations around the city i do appreciate that are doing an excellent job and everyone's doing a quality job in their own right but we need to make sure we don't know quality jobs according to what the militia that they've had over the past well i think paying attention to the central or south and west seattle the immigrant community and the african american community that has been here for a while tend to get along very good i think one of the pieces that are missing is we all don't tend to sit in the same circles and share meals together we don't share academic understanding and we don't share this focus on moving together as a group i think a lot of the times we're seeing ourselves as different you know and what the real difference is me being african american my grandparents and great grandparents got here six generations before the immigrant population got here and it's odd how one group got here before the other group so the two groups see themselves as different as different but when we were in africa in one village i didn't see myself as different then my great grandfather who was or my great great great great grandfather who was six generations before so we're going to so when it was say we says we're still family we were disconnected by ocean and now we're brought together back on the same continent so now what do we do i think one thing everyone sees is america itself has a culture of its own every culture that comes to america within two generations their kids become americanised my grant my great great my family's from south carolina so in south carolina would be american africa so literally i mean you go miles and miles and miles of salt african people and everyone is still speaking in goal and mixes of pidgin and french and  those are some of the original african american people so then my me being first generation seattle when i go back home everyone tells me would you sound so why you talk so this and you talk so that and i remember my freshman year having a group of dude and even my cousin so two different groups family back home and i know my cousins and they were saying well you sound so white you sound so lis and i kept telling them you know really are you sure and they were like yeah and i told him good because i'm going to university of washington i'm paying a lot of money for his education so if you don't hear my language changing then i get my money's worth so are you sure that i sound real proper speaking so then it kind of changes how we view things so now we have these two groups and the two groups can america's african americans being afraid of those that are from the continent and born in africa but now that we're all together the older generation is the older generation of seeing the younger generation it's become a coming americanised and the funny thing is the group that's becoming americanize right now will be the grandfathers and grandmothers of kids that are fully americanised in two generations and so with that said we have to maintain cultural sensitivity we cannot get over here pretend that we are from the continent of africa i see kids that would always say i'm not african american i'm american and in my family being some from south america i mean from south carolina my grandmother and great grandmother and grandfather my father they would say boy you're an african in america so i'm an african in america just like all the other people that africans in america you all know you all now are africans in america and that's who we are so working together we need to be able to sit down and figure out how we're going to get our young people into test scores and to do the right thing we need to figure out how we're going to get them an understanding of down to the simple things of how to graduate high school get into college well you know the main testing is s eighteen a c t and that is my love is getting young people and so we're looking at s eighty if you're really good at math you can take the s a t s if you're not so good at math you go a but i think sharing the little tricks on those wisdoms is going to break down some of these barriers i think a lot of the parents still think that because one group speaks three and four languages and the other group only speaks english that either someone's better or did his get to high school and  longer listen just like the same africans in american that have been here for more than american that have been here for multiple generations their kids no longer listen so with this youth violence thing we're dealing with a bunch of kids that are africans in america that forgot that they're africans and then a forgotten that as africans we have a legacy of excellence so asian kids white kids africans in america polynesians once a generation has been in america they all act the same which is why you violence is a mix of all of these kids who are now so americanize the irish went through it the italians went through it and now we're seeing the africans enter in america and go through it and now we're seeing the new wave of immigrants go through it the russians are going through with all this new wave their first generation of kids they're all going through it so we need to really take a look at ourselves and see how do we come together and learn from the group that's been here for a hundred or so years couple hundred years and the group that's freshly getting here the group that's freshly getting here has a set of resources the group that's been here for hundreds of years have institute of how we mix that together so that needs to be our next talk in understanding what do we do to save a generation of