Page last updated 12/09/2000
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Community Academic Sports and Health Program Inc.
This generation of youth has the unfortunate legacy of being almost totally alienated from society. Juvenile ,violence and crime are running rampant and young offenders seem to have little or no remorse for their actions.
There was a time when most children's lives were strongly influenced by family, school and the church. Now some of our youth are encountering considerable peer pressure to get involved in drugs, gang activities and other types of anti-social behavior.
Society in the mean time has not really come up with a program that would enhance our youth population's physical as well as their social development. In fact, for the most part society has neglected to give some of this segment of the population the necessary social necessities such as roles, values, status, identity and, most important, hope.
Every year growing up in the United States becomes more and more difficult for our youth. Every day our youth find themselves faced with many pitfalls along the way to adulthood without a safety net. Never before have our children had to make so many important decisions that will effect the rest of their lives. This should not be surprising. Our youth are growing up in a media saturated culture and have become morally stunted as a result. In fact, many of our youth are constantly confronted with visual and printed material without the basic literacy skills to effectively distinguish from fact or fiction. This increase trend towards violence, crime and drug abuse will continue until we effectively deal with the root causes such as unemployment, low self esteem, youth idleness and, most important, the values deficiency some of our youth are exhibiting.
This deficiency has been allowed to fester into a negative mind-set which in turn has created a value system that is totally alien to the values we grew up to respect and emulate. C.A.S.H. Inc.'s mission is to help change this negative mind-set by using the Martial arts, Career Mentoring, Computer training, Youth Business Initiatives and Video Talent Night as vehicles. We understand that morals and character building should be taught at home. However, in some cases due to drug abuse, child abuse, neglect and a number of other society problems, some of our children are left to fend for themselves.
Our goal is to first get the attention of our youth, keep it, change his or her peers if needed and then interject choices. We feel that most of the values needed to transform a typical rebellious inner-city youth into a caring rational thinking individual can be found and taught via the above vehicles. For instance, most lay people, when hearing someone mention the martial arts, immediately think of someone hurting another person. Skeptics believe that an overly aggressive hostile youth, or especially children who are impressionable, will get worse if exposed to the martial arts. This could be true if given only the physical side of the art. However, if the youth is shown the importance of philosophy and values combined with the physical, changes can take place.
