From serving time behind bars to giving back his time to the youth, a Central New York man is using his experiences to help youth go down a positive path by offering opportunities he didn’t have.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t have the proper opportunities. So I found my own. It just happened to not be the right ones. So what I want to do is change the algorithm of how people look at redirecting youth,” said Robert Lucas, president of Voice of Da Voiceless, a non profit organization that helps formerly and present incarcerated individuals. Luca also started teaching a psychology communication class to grades 7-12 called CORY, carefully organizing and redirecting the youth. From spending 17 years of his life in and out of prison, he wants to use his experiences to change the narrative.
“I use a mirror in the beginning of the program to identify their self. They have to create the mirror, they have to create their characteristics and design. They have the first time in their life not listening to the noise around them and actually focus on them,” said Lucas.
Part of the class is helping the students create a business plan.
“Every kid in that classroom has a business idea that can make our community better,” said Lucas.
“I enjoy doing art and I enjoy listening to music. So I want to create a place where you could come together and just chill, take your mind off of things, create art while listening to chill music that you like,'” said Naziah Savage, a student in the CORY class.
She says the program has taught her leadership skills.
“If we know we want to do something, how to act on that. He’s giving us all these resources, all these skills. He’s teaching us all these different objectives of ways to go about things. So we could put action into things that we would like to actually do in the future,” said Savage.
It’s programs like this can put youth on a positive path forward.
“I feel like every opportunity that everybody gets in the community is always a way for people to get out of the streets or to really redirect their lives,” said Nurdin Awo, a student in the CORY class.
“I was destroyed because I allowed narratives to take more for me than it gave. And that’s what happens a lot in the urban community. So my initiative to change that is just to really represent what it means to just have faith, what it means to just believe in a process without receiving a monetary gain,” said Lucas.