Tim grew up in poverty with his single mother and two brothers in a dangerous neighborhood in Cincinnati. By age 11, he was selling drugs and guns for cash just to make ends meet. As a juvenile, he got 27 convictions. By his early twenties, he had spent several years in prison. Things changed for […]
Coss grew up in the Lower East Side with a single mother who struggled to support her family on her factory job salary. He remembers, “The guys on the block had chains and money and clothes and everything I wanted that my mom couldn’t provide for me, so as a kid, the people I looked […]
Marquis grew up in the Bronx in the 1980’s. His dad battled a crack cocaine addiction and his uncle was huge in the drug scene. As a way to pay for Pac-Man and bodega snacks, he began stealing first money from his uncle and then crack, which he sold himself. By the time he was […]
Vidal was raised by a single mother in Harlem. By the time he was 10, he had begun selling drugs with his older brother. By the time he was 16, he had been arrested for robbery and drug possession. At Rikers, he was jumped by a group of 20 teenagers from a rival gang. At […]
In her words: I have always known that education was my key out of poverty. It was pretty obvious to me from a young age, even though I was raised by a single mother who did not complete the 8th grade. But somehow, I just knew that education was the way for me to obtain […]
David was born in Harlem in 1948 and, like many young Black men of time, received his early education in the streets. David began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around the age of 10, and by the age of 14 had moved on to using and selling heroin on the streets of Harlem. For years, […]
Darren Mack was born and raised in Brooklyn in a community that was plagued with a high concentration of poverty, substandard schools, and high rates of unemployment among Black and Latino males. In 1992, at the age of 17, Darren was arrested for being an accomplice to a robbery and was ultimately sentenced to 20 […]
Marlon was born in Brooklyn as the youngest of three children to a family who had recently immigrated from Trinidad. He was a good student as a child and on the honor roll in elementary school. But, when he was 14, a few traumatic events happened to him that stopped the academic accolades from coming. […]
While a freshman in high school in a small suburban town in Long Island, Sarah became hooked on drugs. She was a rebellious kid and wanted to do her own thing. What started as a daily use of marijuana quickly turned into prescription pill abuse. However, when she could no longer afford $50 per oxy […]
Jamie is a woman from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She had a difficult and traumatic childhood, and became homeless at the age of 14. She couldn’t bear living at home and decided to crash with her friends. Eventually, she ran out of options and tried to call her mother in an attempt to return home – […]
