The Young People's Project

By:Jessica Lusky

For just over 20 years, a project called Young People’s Project (YPP) has been focusing on social change in the education system. They have been teaching math literacy and coding skills while embracing their past and realizing how it has prepared them for a future filled with growth and success. Eight 8th grade students from Brinkley Middle School in Jackson, Mississippi founded this program in 1996 to train, employ, and support many high school students in becoming Math Literacy Workers. In the first ten years, they accomplished this task with 1,000 students. The Math Literacy Workers that they train and support begin passing on their talents by teaching math to elementary students in their neighborhoods and becoming engaged citizens who are ready to make a difference in their own lives, then the lives of others, and eventually throughout the United States.

The efforts of these students amazed me while looking through their website, http://www.typp.org. These African American students realized they were were poor an oppressed and wanted to become a part of a society that had meaning to them. They turned right to education while figuring out how the system they are a part of can be drastically changed which is outstanding to me. The education system never receives the amount of credit it deserves, so the acknowledgment it was given by this program was very shocking and inspiring to me.

There are many ways to reduce the presence of ethnic, gender, and class discrimination, but the way they envisioned the future in terms of breaking through these barriers was very inspiring to me because of my passion for education related work. YPP focuses on using math literacy work to develop the capability of elementary through high school students to thrive in school and life in general. In doing this, the students were involved in efforts to eliminate institutional setbacks. While working on this mission they visualized a day when every individual regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or class has equal access to an education and the high quality skills needed to meet and overcome the challenges of their generation.