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A message from Kimberly
Caldwell, the chairperson for the
San Diego ACT-SO program:
"ACT-SO is a youth program that we can believe in. Our
black youth need to have outlets to express themselves and identifies
them in ways that test scores cannot and goes beyond answering questions
on a literature response or job application. Our youth need experience
and guidance in fields of study that can lead them into their careers.
Our kids need to be exposed regularly to what it takes to run a
business, create images with words that will stand the test of time and
can lead others to take action, political or otherwise. We need to stand
up and push our children forward to places that we will be left out of
if we continue to sit still.
We say we want our kids to be creative and/or critical thinkers, to have
independence and act with reason, yet we often don’t have time to spend
with them talking to them or modeling what deeper cognition is all about
in order to develop their thought process or check them for deeper
understanding during the course of the workweek and when they fight back
just a little and say that they don’t want to be in a club or a part of
a group or organization we frown and say, “Ok, I tried.” We have to do
more than try. We have to succeed and require that our kids do more than
just the same old same old. Our kids are currently being left in the
dust and they don’t have a prayer if we don’t send them up and take
action behind those prayers.
The Afro-Academic Cultural Technological and Scientific Olympics
(ACT-SO) program needs student participants, adult volunteers, mentors
and sponsors from our community and beyond. We have the power to change
the world - look at the power of hip-hop. Hip-hop is changing the world.
That comes from us. We have way more in us. We just have to excel in
more than the hip-hop world and the fashion world. We have to get back
to taking care of our own and growing those roots into strong oak trees
and redwoods with the solid foundations that we know the kids need and
stop giving it lip service and pushing the reality to the back of our
minds dreaming of what could have been “if only...”
You don’t have to be a nurse, teacher or a doctor, you can be a toy
maker, seamstress, a mechanic, a carpenter, or a shop owner - you just
need a vision, a desire and then you have to believe that you can
achieve, work hard, study hard and overcome obstacles and acknowledge
success. Many of our kids won’t get a vision because they have not had
anyone to look at long enough to realize that they to can be like Mike
and do better than he if they so choose.
I, Kimberly Caldwell, have been the chairperson for the San Diego ACT-SO
program for four years. In those four years we have had nine young
ladies and two young men participate. Only two of those young women went
on to the National Competition. Ashley Grishim is a continuing student
at Spelman. Kania Batiste is in her first year of college in Texas.
Neither of the two young men that participated in ACT-SO locally
competed locally - they dropped out before the competition. One of them,
Jawan Caldwell, is in junior college persuing his dream of being a
professional football player. Five of the remaining young ladies are in
college and one is in her last year of high school but inactive in the
ACT-SO program. I know that we can do better in San Diego."
