One Solution

The Elevate Prize will help us to transform the health and well-being of our communities, our education system, and criminal justice systems simultaneously. Funding and visibility are exactly what our Rebels for Peace young leaders program needs in order to scale our proven impact. We have a resilience-focused, evidence-based educational model that is innovative (youth-teaching-youth), transformative, and very scalable with the right support and funding. The Elevate Prize will help us to:

Increase the visibility, drive funding, and offer support so that we can train more Rebels for Peace young leaders to nationally expand the following programs:

-PREVENTION: Resilience and Well-being education for elementary and high school students in underserved communities to increase safety, reduce or eliminate the reliance on police presence in schools, dissolve the school to prison pipeline, and improve student outcomes;

-INTERVENTION: Insight to Well-being programming and support network for currently incarcerated juveniles and adults; and 

-SUSTAINABILITY: Ongoing support post-incarceration ensuring individuals don't fall through the gap that often traps people who are trying to recreate a new life, based on a mindset of resilience and well being rather than former gang connections, previous ways of making money, or other destructive family/social ties. 

I have always been a passionate believer that the state of the world is a reflection of the state of our minds. The societies and systems we have created are only as healthy as the minds that invented them. In order to transform our world, we need a f*&%ing revolution in our education and investment in resilience and well-being in all layers of society. It is as critical for presidents and police as it is for prison inmates and mass shooters. I have written a successful book about this, started a nonprofit, gave a speech at a peace summit in South Side Chicago that was picked up by Goalcast and viewed on the internet millions of times...this has been my passion and my career for over 15 years. But in October of 2019 it became a tragically personal imperative when a deeply troubled young man who was frustrated with his repeated interactions with the law attempted to kill himself by running his car head on into my sister and her two small children, killing all three of them (whereas he survived and is currently in prison, awaiting trial).  I am devoting my life to prevention, wellbeing, and radical systemic transformation.

One Solution has many programs nationally and abroad, but our flagship Rebels for Peace youth-led program started in South Side Chicago as a movement to rebel against the mindsets that perpetuate violence and inequality. It initially consisted of grass-roots meet-ups, clubs at schools, and local events but has evolved into formal 6-week long youth leadership paid internships, an evidence-based SEL curriculum being taught by young adults to youth in schools, and well being programs for juveniles and adults in prisons, with a potential to start working with police officers.

Racism, inequality, police brutality, the school to prison pipeline, the revolving door of recidivism, and the lack of support for building a healthy life after prison are just a handful of the problems that we are aiming to solve with our Rebels for Peace program. We are solving these problems by addressing their root source: lack of resilience and well being. We have a phrase that "Hurt people hurt people and healthy people help people." The current approach of police in schools and "punishing" or incarcerating people for harmful actions is not addressing the root of the issue, only exacerbating it. Whereas education about resilience and wellbeing heals the broken system.

Our work is innovative because:

1. We focus on and treat the internal source of problems like inequality, hopelessness, and the violence that ensues. These are not problems we are born with, they're problems we're born into. Our programs and curricula educate people about their innate resilience and freedom of mind so they can reconnect to a deeper well being and freedom of thinking allowing them to break out of destructive, learned thought systems. 

2. We don't focus only on "at-risk youth." We focus on all players in a system. Teachers and principals, law enforcement, parole officers, parents AND young people are all included in our programming, because change must come from within all parts of a system.

3. We train youth from the community to facilitate our curriculum in schools. When young people learn from someone who looks and sounds like them, who has faced similar life challenges, they find it more relatable, inspiring and deeply transformational. And the teachers love the break!!

4. We're tackling all 3: Prevention-working with elementary and high school students, Intervention- working with youth and adults involved in the criminal justice system, Sustainability - creating a support network for those released from prison.

We have secured vital partnerships that allow us to offer such broad impact and will help us to grow nationally. While One Solution is based in South Side Chicago, we partner with the Insight Alliance (out of Portland, OR) on our prison programming and the SPARK Initiative (out of Tampa, FL) on our evidence-based, CASEL-approved curriculum for elementary and high school students. Together, our three organizations have formed a collective so that we can more quickly scale to offer our prevention, intervention and sustainability-focused solutions across the country. Our next step is to train more facilitators and to research our specific "youth-teaching-youth" model so the Rebels for Peace can gain access to greater funding. Our long-term goal is to offer this understanding to youth across America, because only when well being is a part of our education system and our communities, will we begin to see our systems and societies transform. In addition to programming and research, we continue to create unique media content about the power of our work to transform people and society. It's an important part of our model to creatively use media to shift thought systems and begin to tell a new story about humanity.