On the other side of the country, the Ahead leadership Program reaches out to high school boys through a student residence near the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Then we follow a special curriculum that touches on many of the virtues that we feel would be appropriate for our young men and women. Perhaps the most important aspect is that Midtown individually monitors each of the teens. The instilling of a desire for the virtues is done through personal friendships with the students. While helping to awaken a spiritual life in the young people in their care, Midtown does not require attendance at any religious activity.
Participation is on a strictly voluntary basis.
There was this fellow who I grew up with as a neighbor, and he got into the program to help cope with his rough family father a drunk, and his mother a tramp. He was a good-hearted guy who held out for a long time but eventually he ended up getting involved in drugs and hanging out with gangs. I guess he's dead by now. We recognize intuitively its importance, but find it all but impossible to grasp in its essentials. Character is, at one and the same time, the most important and intangible things about a person.