The New York City mayor’s office is calling its recently announced Young Men’s Initiative, America’s “boldest and most comprehensive effort to tackle the broad disparities slowing the advancement of black and Latino young men.”
The initiative will include job placement and fatherhood classes for participants, with an added focus on training for probation officers and school staff who can have a direct impact on the young men receiving services. The program will target 315,000 black and Latino men between the ages of 16 and 24, and will involve more than a dozen city agencies.
The NYC Department of Probation, which supervises nearly 30,000 ex-cons, most of whom are black and Latino males, will open five satellite offices in high-risk neighborhoods to connect men on probation to jobs and educational programs. A major goal of the project is to reduce prison recidivism.
The initiative will receive $127 million in public and private funds. Thirty million dollars of the money will come directly from billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s foundation, with another $30 million being donated by hedge fund manager George Soros. The remaining $67.5 million will be paid by the city.
The mayor plans to issue an executive order that will bar city agencies from interfering with access to city jobs for applicants who have past criminal convictions unrelated to the job they are applying for. Bloomberg said, “A job is the best anti-poverty and anti-crime program ever devised anywhere in the world.”
