Youthbuild Documentary (WT)
The YouthBuild feature documentary (working title) closely follows a year in the life of three young people who are selected for YouthBuild, which combines innovative education with high stakes community rebuilding in one of the toughest cities in America: Newark, New Jersey.
The film is as much about powerful stories of rebuilding neglected neighborhoods and transforming education in America, as it is about the personal struggles to reclaim and reinvent these promising but fragile lives.
We follow the process to select the incoming class, to the official completion of the program in June 2010. Some may graduate, some will not… Along the way the film explores education, poverty, and the deeply emotional and revealing process – for the leaders and the students – that is a year in the life of YouthBuild.
About YouthBuild
YouthBuild is a youth and community development program that simultaneously addresses core issues facing low-income communities: housing, education, employment, crime prevention, and leadership development. In YouthBuild programs, low-income young people ages 16-24 work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas, learn job skills and serve their communities by building affordable housing for homeless and low-income people, and transform their own lives and roles in society. All YouthBuild students are poor and many have had experience with foster care, juvenile justice, welfare, and homelessness. Participants spend 6 to 24 months in the full-time program, dividing their time between the construction site and the YouthBuild alternative school. Community- and faith-based nonprofit organizations sponsor most programs, although some are sponsored by public agencies. Each YouthBuild program raises private and public funds to support itself. Primary support comes from the U.S. Department of Labor through a dedicated federal line item.
Project Update
DOL announces funding recipients, bringing total of YouthBuild supported programs to 228.
The project has recently begun filming, with initial interviews with founder Dorothy Stoneman, and key participants from the early years of YouthBuild, and the primary year-in-the-life focus has shifted from North Philadelphia to Newark, NJ, where there are exciting developments as YouthBuild Newark Executive Director Robert Clarke was recently awarded $5 million in government funding to replicate YouthBuild programs across the state of New Jersey. Read more >>