Founded in 1979, the Andrew Glover Youth Program finds kids in New York City courtrooms who “might turn their lives around if they had a chance.”AGYP gives these kids counseling, training, education, and employment assistance. By “[keeping] them in school and working and engaged in positive things, [they] keep them out of prison.” The Glover program has three main goals. First, they want to “intervene and reclaim young people from lives of crime.” Second, “give the overloaded court system a reliable alternative to incarceration,” and lastly, “make the Lower East Side and East Harlem communities safer for everyone.” These goals are all a part of the program’s main goal of stopping crime without prison.
The Andrew Glover Youth Program’s central challenge is to halt this cycle of incarceration and poverty for the youth in two neighborhoods: East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Problems that are faced by these areas are: concentrated poverty, broken families, failing education and drugs. The Lower East Side contains one of the country’s most concentrated areas of public housing, high percentages of children born to single, young mothers, an high school 50% graduation rate, and an abundance of drugs. The program has helped thousands of kids overcome these factors and turn their lives around and will help many more in the future.
Here’s a link to the program’s website: http://agyp.org/
