Youth Achievers USA YouthUSA Radio

ALL DAY LONG!!! We can debate the benefits of affordable health care, racial inequality, immigration, ethics in government, and at the end of the day, our leaders will have talked through, around and over the single most important issue of our time.  

NATIONAL SECURITY and how it relates to America's most vulnerable citizens is a conversation we must have, and now is the best time to have that conversation.  We'll need to start looking at our youth through a NATIONAL SECURITY lens if we expect to reverse some 400 plus years of INSECURITY where we live, learn, work and/or worship.

On behalf of the YouthUSA Corporate Village of beneficiaries, stakeholders and officers, we are, in this season, collectively mourning the loss of a pillar in our community and this nation.  Ms. Evelyn Walker Armstrong served as a founding director for the national 501c3 public charity, Youth Achievers USA Institute (EIN 20-4945833).  She contributed faithfully through executive consultation and philanthropic investment until her death on January 10, 2015.

In September 2006, Evelyn co-founded The J.D. and Laurena Walker Fund, as the development program of Youth Achievers USA Institute.  She has since served as chair of that program task force. In this capacity, she constantly challenged her fellow officers to accomplish great works with modest means. 

Up to the final hours of her “dash,” that symbolic measure of her temporal economy on earth from April 18, 1927 to January 10, 2015, Evelyn was at work, tasking care givers from Visiting Nurses Association with feeding her one last meal of grits, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and black coffee; and spiritually, through reading scriptures from Romans 8 and Proverbs.  Sadly, she expressed her perceived failure in life was the inability to motivate her beloved Walker family members to work “on the positive side of the ledger” to improve their own lifestyles with goals and promote The J.D. and Laurena Walker Fund.

Youth Achievers USA Institute is ready, willing and able to assist trustees and attorneys in developing program supports in the area of positive youth development.  We pray that our combined efforts to engage Evelyn’s friends, colleagues and beneficiaries will enhance your capacity for transforming Evelyn’s vision of young people as community assets on the positive side of the ledger.

 

In our nation’s birthplace, the City of Brotherly Love, your American Mentors encountered a STATE OF THE UNION type question, Why does life have to be so difficult? YouthUSA National Director, Evelyn Walker Armstrong, at age 87, posed the question during a knowledge transfer session with fellow board members.  Then, from her own experiences and insights she answered her own question, “It doesn’t. We make it difficult.

Welcome to 2015.  A gulf of mistrust describes our STATE OF THE UNION unless WE THE PEOPLE overcome and form a more perfect union.  Fifty years after demonstrators crossed Selma, Alabama’s Pettus Bridge, protesting for equal rights under the law of the land--fifty years after blacks laid beaten and abused by law enforcement. For the second time in American history, a Black Male gets to share his minority vision for America’s future before the historic 114th session of the United States Congress. In the house, a majority sits waiting to govern from a Grand Ol Party point of view. 

You can tweet us @YouthUSA, Like us on Facebook.com/YouthAchieversUSA or call in during our live show 657-383-1405 Saturday, 12 noon eastern, 11 am central, 9 am on the West Coast.

Commentators on the color of Barack Obama’s Presidency suggest the era has been all about race.  So, 2.1 billion believers on the planet will need to help some folks PAY ATTENTION.  Your vision for America’s future has never been about race, but a walk in the light.  The shared vision that somehow escapes airtime and print as well as justice for all is simply this, WE THE PEOPLE in order to form a more perfect union...

While optimists have been banking on a new age of racial harmony,  pessimists seem to be more fearful of a surge in racial strife.  There is, however,  place for common vision to take shape.  The questions before us are at what cost and whether or not we are ready to pursue, for ourselves and our posterity, that vision of a more perfect union.

You can tweet us @YouthUSA, Like us on Facebook.com/YouthAchieversUSA or call in during our live show 657-383-1405 Saturday, 12 noon eastern, 11 am central, 9 am on the West Coast. 

 

In our last episode, we took one more look -- hopefully our last -- at a Gulf of Mistrust between some law enforcers and citizens of color we had hoped justice would serve equally.  We learned of a community of believers to include 2.1 billion Christians who could touch and agree that #BlackLivesMatter. We witnessed evidence of endless possibilities for peace on Earth as the U. S. President found faith and favor enough to make business as usual a practice of the past.

HASHTAG #MY BROTHER’S KEEPER is the shortest distance between a divisive past and an inclusive vision of America’s Future.  The question is how much do we want peace, justice and liberty, and how much are we willing to pay to secure it

Tweet us @YouthUSA, Like us on Facebook.com/YouthAchieversUSA or call in during our live show 657-383-1405 Saturday, 12 noon eastern, 11 am central, 9 am on the West Coast. 

Last week we called on friends to include 2.1 billion Christians to touch and agree that Black Lives Matter. From our 2014 Christmas narrative we learned that lynching was a widely acknowledged practice in the United States until the middle of the 20th century.  The U.S. Senate resolved to apologize for its own failure to enact anti-lynching legislation.  As Ebenezer Scrooge might observe, that should be behind us as our ghost of Christmas past. 

For demonstrators taking to the streets protesting, proclaiming and declaring equal justice, it’s a new season!  The injustice is called by another name, but the results are still the same.  The numbers add up to an increase in dead folk and an ever-widening Gulf of Mistrust.

The President’s assessment of events on the streets and in the courtroom accurately portrait the problem America faces this week of Christmas present.  You can ask any of 2.1 billion Christians on earth about the jacked up arrest, trials and lynching of Jesus the Christ 2000 years ago, to get your sense of what needs to be done.

In Christmas present, WE THE PEOPLE will need to realize WE ARE THE WORLD.  Our friends are watching, hoping for a brighter day.  So, let’s start living like Christmas future is a goal worth sharing by coming together to bridge what the president has termed, a Gulf of Mistrust.

What will you do to make a change?  What will you do to save our own lives? You can tweet us @YouthUSA, like us on Facebook.com/YouthAchieversUSA or call in during our live show 657-383-1405 Saturday, 12 noon ET, 11 am CT, 9 am PT.